No Theoretical Barrier

Excerpt from the novel Jurassic Park icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Michael Crichton icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park" book cover. [Formatted]

     The consternation that followed was entirely misplaced, in Dodgson’s view. The trouble with money men was that they didn’t keep up: they had invested in a field, but they didn’t know what was possible.
     In fact, there had been discussion of cloning dinosaurs in the technical literature as far back as 1982. With each passing year, the manipulation of DNA had grown easier. Genetic material had already been extracted from Egyptian mummies, and from the hide of a quagga, a zebralike African animal that had become extinct in the 1880s. By 1985, it seemed possible that quagga DNA might be reconstituted and a new animal grown. If so, it would be the first creature brought back from extinction solely by reconstruction of its DNA. If that was possible, what else was also possible? The mastodon? The sabre-toothed tiger? The dodo?
     Or even a dinosaur?
     Of course, no dinosaur DNA was known to exist anywhere in the world. But by grinding up large quantities of dinosaur bones it might be possible to extract fragments of DNA. Formerly it was thought that fossilization eliminated all DNA. Now that was recognized as untrue. If enough DNA fragments were recovered, it might be possible to clone a living animal.
     Back in 1982, the technical problems had seemed daunting. But there was no theoretical barrier. It was merely difficult, expensive, and unlikely to work. Yet it was certainly possible, if anyone cared to try.
     InGen had apparently decided to try.
     “What they have done,” Dodgson said, “is build the greatest single tourist attraction in the history of the world. As you know, zoos are extremely popular. Last year, more Americans visited zoos than all professional baseball and football games combined. And the Japanese love zoos—there are fifty zoos in Japan, and more being built. And for this zoo, InGen can charge whatever they want. Two thousand dollars a day, ten thousand dollars a day… And then there is the merchandising. The picture books, T-shirts, video games, caps, stuffed toys, comic books, and pets.”
     “Pets?”
     “Of course. If InGen can make full-size dinosaurs, they can also make pygmy dinosaurs as household pets. What child won’t want a little dinosaur as a pet? A little patented animal for their very own. InGen will sell millions of them. And InGen will engineer them so that these pet dinosaurs can only eat InGen pet food….”
     “Jesus,” somebody said.
     “Exactly,” Dodgson said. “The zoo is the centerpiece of an enormous enterprise.”
     “You said these dinosaurs will be patented?”
     “Yes. Genetically engineered animals can now be patented. The Supreme Court ruled on that in favor of Harvard in 1987. InGen will own its dinosaurs, and no one else can legally make them.”
     “What prevents us from creating our own dinosaurs?” someone said.
     “Nothing, except that they have a five-year start. It’ll be almost impossible to catch up before the end of the century.”
     He paused. “Of course, if we could obtain examples of their dinosaurs, we could reverse engineer them and make our own, with enough modifications in the DNA to evade their patents.”
     “Can we obtain examples of their dinosaurs?”
     Dodgson paused. “I believe we can, yes.”
     Somebody cleared his throat. “There wouldn’t be anything illegal about it….”
     “Oh no,” Dodgson said quickly. “Nothing illegal. I’m talking about a legitimate source of their DNA. A disgruntled employee, or some trash improperly disposed of, something like that.”
     “Do you have a legitimate source, Dr. Dodgson?”
     “I do,” Dodgson said. “But I’m afraid there is some urgency to the decision, because InGen is experiencing a small crisis, and my source will have to act within the next twenty-four hours.”
     A long silence descended over the room. The men looked at the secretary, taking notes, and the tape recorder on the table in front of her.
     “I don’t see the need for a formal resolution on this,” Dodgson said. “Just a sense of the room, as to whether you feel I should proceed….”
     Slowly the the heads nodded.
     Nobody spoke. Nobody went on record. They just nodded silently.
     “Thank you for coming, gentlemen,” Dodgson said. “I’ll take it from here.”

“John Hammond’s About as Sinister as Walt Disney.”

Excerpt from the novel Jurassic Park icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Michael Crichton icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park" book cover. [Formatted]

     “I was first contacted,” Morris explained, “by the Office of Technology Transfer. The OTT monitors shipments of American technology that might have military significance. They called to say that InGen had two areas of possible illegal technology transfer. First, InGen shipped three Cray XMPs to Costa Rica. InGen characterized it as a transfer within corporate divisions, and said they weren’t for resale. But OTT couldn’t imagine why the hell somebody’d need that power in Costa Rica.”
     “Three Crays,” Grant said. “Is that a kind of computer?”
     Morris nodded. “Very powerful supercomputers. To put it in perspective, three Crays represent more computing power than any other privately held company in America. And InGen sent the machines to Costa Rica. You have to wonder why.”
     “I give up. Why?” Grant said.
     “Nobody knows. And the Hoods are even more worrisome,” Morrise continued. “Hoods are automated gene sequencers—machines that work out the genetic code by themselves. They’re so new that they haven’t been put on the restricted lists yet. But any genetic engineering lab is likely to have one, if it can afford the half-million-dollar price tag.” He flipped through his notes. “Well, it seems InGen shipped twenty-four Hood sequencers to their island in Costa Rica.
     “Again, they said it was a transfer within divisions and not an export,” Morris said. “There wasn’t much that OTT could do. They’re not officially concerned with use. But InGen was obviously setting up one of the most powerful genetic engineering facilities in the world in an obscure Central American country. A country with no regulations. That kind of thing has happened before.”
     There had already been cases of American bioengineering companies moving to another country so they would not be hampered by regulations and rules. The most flagrant, Morris explained, was the Biosyn rabies case.
     In 1986, Genetic Biosyn Corporation of Cupertino tested a bio-engineered rabies vaccine on a farm in Chile. They didn’t inform the government of Chile, or the farm workers involved. They simply released the vaccine.
     The vaccine consisted of a live rabies virus, genetically modified to be nonvirulent. But the virulence hadn’t been tested; Biosyn didn’t know whether the virus could still cause rabies or not. Even worse, the virus had been modified. Ordinarily you couldn’t contract rabies unless you were bitten by an animal. But Biosyn modified the rabies virus to cross the pulmonary alveoli; you could get an infection just inhaling it. Biosyn staffers brought this live rabies virus down to Chile in a carry-on bag on a commercial airline flight. Morris often wondered what would have happened if the capsule had broken open during the flight. Everybody on the plane might have been infected with rabies.
     It was outrageous. It was irresponsible. It was criminally negligent. But no action was taken against Biosyn. The Chilean farmers who unwittingly risked their lives were ignorant peasants; the government of Chile had an economic crisis to worry about; and the American authorities had no jurisdiction. So Lewis Dodgson, the geneticist responsible for the test, was still working at Biosyn. Biosyn was still as reckless as ever. And other American companies were hurrying to set up facilities in foreign countries that lacked sophistication about genetic research. Countries that perceived genetic engineering to be like any other high-tech development, and thus welcomed it to their lands, unaware of the dangers posed.
     “So that’s why we began our investigation of InGen,” Morris said. “About three weeks ago.”
     “And what have you actually found?” Grant said.
     “Not much,” Morris admitted. “When I go back to San Francisco, we’ll probably have to close the investigation. And I think I’m about finished here.” He started packing up his briefcase. “By the way, what does ‘juvenile hyperspace’ mean?”
     “That’s just a fancy label for my report,” Grant said. “‘Hyperspace’ is a term for multidimensional space—like three-dimensional tic-tac-toe. If you were to take all the behaviors of an animal, its eating and movement and seleping, you could plot the animal within the multidimensional space. Some paleontologists refer to the behavior of an animal as occurring in an ecological hyperspace. ‘Juvenile hyperspace’ would just refer to the behavior of juvenile dinosaurs—if you wanted to be as pretentious as possible.”
     At the far end of the trailer, the phone rang. Ellie answered it. She said, ” “He’s in a meeting right now. Can he call you back?”
     Morris snapped his briefcase shut and stood. “Thanks for your help and the beer,” he said.
     “No problem,” Grant said.
     Grant walked with Morris down the trailer to the door at the far end. Morris said, “Did Hammond ever ask for any physical materials from your site? Bones, or eggs, or anything like that?”
     “No,” Grant said.
     “Dr. Sattler mentioned you do some genetic work here….”
     “Well, not exactly,” Grant said. “When we remove fossils that are broken or for some other reason not suitable for museum preservation, we send the bones out to a lab that grinds them up and tries to extract proteins for us. The proteins are then identified and the report is sent back to us.”
     “Which lab is that?” Morris asked.
     “Medical Biologic Services in Salt Lake.”
     “How’d you choose them?”
     “Competitive bids.”
     “The lab has nothing to do with InGen?” Morris asked.
     “Not that I know,” Grant said.
     They came to the door of the trailer. Grant opened it, and felt the rush of hot air from outside. Morris paused to put on his sunglasses.
     “One last thing,” Morris said. “Suppose InGen wasn’t really making a museum exhibit. Is there anything else they could have done with the information in the report you gave them?”
     Grant laughed. “Sure. They could feed a baby hadrosaur.”
     Morris laughed, too. “A baby hadrosaur. That’d be something see. How big were they?”
     “About so,” Grant said, holding his hands six inches apart. “Squirrel-size.”
     “And how long before they become full-grown?”
     “Three years,” Grant said. “Give or take.”
     Morris held out his hand. “Well, thanks again for your help.”
     “Take it easy driving back,” Grant said. He watched for a moment as Morris walked back toward his car, and then closed the trailer door.
     Grant said, “What did you think?”
     Ellie shrugged. “Naïve.”
     “You like the part where John Hammond is the evil arch-villain?” Grant laughed. “John Hammond’s about as sinister as Walt Disney. By the way, who called?”
     “Oh,” Ellie said, “it was a woman named Alice Levin. She works at Columbia Medical Center. You know her?”
     Grant shook his head. “No.”
     “Well, it was something about identifying some remains. She wants you to call her back right away.”

The Old Message

Excerpt from the novel Neuromancer icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by William Gibson icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

William Gibson's "Neuromancer" novel art. [Formatted]

     “And that’s the last thing you remember?” He watched her scrape the last of the freeze-dried hash from the rectangular steel box cover that was their only plate.
     She nodded, her eyes huge in the firelight. “I’m sorry, Case, honest to God. It was just the shit, I guess, an’ it was…” She hunched forward, forearms across her knees, her face twisted for a few seconds with pain or its memory. “I just needed the money. To get home, I guess, or… hell,” she said, “you wouldn’t hardly talk to me.”
     “There’s no cigarettes?”
     “Goddam, Case, you asked me that ten times today! What’s wrong with you?” She twisted a strand of hair into her mouth and chewed at it.
     “But the food was here? It was already here?”
     “I told you, man, it was washed up on the damn beach.”
     “Okay. Sure. It’s seamless.”
     She started to cry again, a dry sobbing. “Well, damn you anyway, Case,” she managed, finally, “I was doin’ just fine her by myself.”
     He got up, taking his jacket, and ducked through the doorway, scraping his wrist on rough concrete. There was no moon, no wind, sea sound all around him in the darkness. His jeans were tight and clammy. “Okay,” he said to the night, “I buy it. I guess I buy it. But tomorrow some cigarettes better wash up.” His own laughter startled him. “A case of beer wouldn’t hurt, while you’re at it.” He turned and re-entered the bunker.
     She was stirring the embers with a length of silvered wood. “Who was that, Case, up in your coffin in Cheap Hotel? Flash samurai with those silver shades, black leather. Scared me, and after, I figured maybe she was your new girl, ‘cept she looked like more money than you had….” She glanced back at him. “I’m real sorry I stole your RAM.”
     “Never mind,” he said. “Doesn’t mean anything. So you just took it over to this guy and had him access it for you?”
     “Tony,” she said. “I’d been seein’ him, kinda. He had a habit an’ we… anyway, yeah, I remember him running it by on this monitor, and it was this real amazing graphics stuff, and I remember wonderin’ how you—”
     “There wasn’t any graphics in there,” he interrepted.
     “Sure was. I just couldn’t figure how you’d have all those pictures of when I was little, Case. How my daddy looked, before he left. Gimme this duck one time, painted wood, and you had a picture of that….”
     “Tony see it?”
     “I don’t remember. Next thing, I was on the beach, real early, sunrise, those birds all yellin’ so lonely. Scared ’cause I didn’t have a shot on me, nothing’, an’ I knew I’d be gettin’ sick…. An’ I walked an’ walked, ’til it was dark, an’ found this place, an’ next day the food washed in, all tangled in the green sea stuff like leaves of hard jelly.” She slid her stick into the embers and left it there. “Never did get sick,” she said, as embers crawled. “Missed cigarettes more. How ’bout you, Case? You still wired?” Firelight dancing under her cheekbones, remembered flash of Wizard’s Castle and Tank War Europa.
     “No,” he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that ran in her, something he’d known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.
     The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal part shooting of against the wall as salt-rotten cloth gave, and then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger’s memory, the drive held.
     She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a leaping flare that threw their locked shadows across the bunker wall.
     Later, as they lay together, his hand between her thighs, he remembered her on the beach, the white foam pulling at her ankles, and he remembered what she had said.
     “He told you I was coming,” he said.
     But she only rolled against him, buttocks against his thighs, and put her hand over his, and muttered something out of dream.

Thank Your Stars You’re Not that Way

Carnies icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 (track 05 from the Clockwork Angels LP by Rush icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 )
“Carnies” Song Lyrics icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

Rush's "Clockwork Angels" album cover. [Formatted]

Seven Cities of Gold icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 (track 07 from the Clockwork Angels LP)
“Seven Cities of Gold” Song Lyrics icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12
Wish Them Well icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 (track 11 from the Clockwork Angels LP)
“Wish Them Well” Song Lyrics icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12