Reading Omens in the Escape of Genetically Engineered Dinosaurs, 1970s–1990s

ABSTRACT

The catastrophic scenario of Jurassic Park is known worldwide and across generations, thanks to two movie trilogies, as well as countless video games, toys, and other derived products inspired by Michael Crichton's 1990 novel. Despite Jurassic Park's originality, stories of genetically engineered dinosaurs on the loose made their debut during the 1970s, when genetic technologies, such as recombinant DNA, were being developed. This article retraces, through a series of examples, the rise of a now classic narrative featuring genetically engineered dinosaurs escaping their creators, from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s. The succeeding variations around this narrative eventually forged a powerful, long-lasting cultural device processing anxieties into entertainment by fictionally predicting the consequences of genetic technologies. The deep past and dinosaurs were fashioned into a screen on which the public learned to read omens about the technological future and the end of a traditional distinction between natural and artificial.*

Introduction

It is fascinating to consider how, across more than 65 million years, dinosaurs have been walking our dreams and nightmares. Even before the invention of the taxonomic concept of "Dinosauria" in the mid nineteenth century, the fossilized bones of these animals had inspired countless stories and myths wherever they were found.¹ Along with the works of fiction and the artful exhibitions of bones in museum halls that multiplied during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,² the language of science itself firmly cast the image of dinosaurs as hybrid monsters to fear and love, with names such as Megalosaurus and Tyrannosaurus.³ Early on, the idea of dinosaurs emerging from the depths of Earth and time inspired writers and filmmakers to conceive cautionary tales about science, technology, and exploration. As fictional characters, and for about the last two hundred years, dinosaurs have come to signal dangerous thresholds on which humanity has been seen to stand.

Amid this long and rich history, this article focuses on the period between the 1970s and the 1990s, when Western societies began to worry about the effects genetic engineering could have on their own organization and sense of identity. It shows that dinosaurs, which were then at the center of important taxonomic debates between paleontologists,⁴ became part of what is now a classic tale. Literary and cinematographic variations on a fictional narrative featuring dinosaurs on the loose served as a way to gaze into the future of genetic manipulation and its possibly disastrous consequences. From a relatively forgotten short story, "Paleontology: An Experimental Science," published in 1974 by American geologist and fiction writer Robert Olsen, to the 1993 blockbuster film Jurassic Park, the public learned how to read omens in stories of genetically engineered dinosaurs escaping their enclosure. If both the novel and the movie Jurassic Park have received a great amount of attention, too little has been given to the preceding and lesser-known stories that are also centered around genetically engineered dinosaurs on the loose. This article is not interested in retrospectively identifying "precursors" to Jurassic Park to satisfy a need for erudition. Rather, it examines how stories of uncontainable, manufactured dinosaurs emerged and evolved in tandem with concerns over genetic technologies between the 1970s and the 1990s. Embodying both the strangeness of the deep past and the new powers of modern genetics, dinosaurs escaping their enclosure were conveyed to embody the invisible and unpredictable implications of meddling with DNA.

Created by individuals from the United States and Australia, the stories this article analyzes are built on two key premises. First, dinosaurs can be and have been brought back to life through genetic technologies. Second, the engineered dinosaurs eventually evade the control of their engineers. Each selected story constitutes an original variation on this two-tiered core narrative. Placed in a chronological sequence, they tell one of evolving concerns about genetic technologies. Although they all warn against the potential dangers of meddling with DNA, they each convey a different idea of what is being threatened, and the genetically engineered dinosaurs on the loose come to serve as metaphors for a wide variety of contemporaneous concerns related to unchecked capitalism, changes in gender norms, ecological threats, and reproductive technologies. This article brings to light how genetically engineered dinosaurs became, during the last decades of the twentieth century, a popular and effective way to convey fears of a crumbling social and natural order. The irreparable escape of these dinosaurs echoed the ever-increasing difficulty of understanding a world in which technology and nature appeared increasingly entangled and indistinguishable.

The article opens its investigation with Robert Olsen's short story "Paleontology: An Experimental Science." Early on, the engineered dinosaurs played the role of symbolic bodies on which fears related to the integrity of the human body and its fragile dependence on other life-forms could be transposed. Through a mock series of scientific articles written by a team of American geneticists, Olsen indirectly reports the accidents that follow the recreation of a Tyrannosaurus. The publication of this story is contemporaneous with the early debate on the technology of recombinant DNA (rDNA).⁵ The debate focused on the conditions required to safely carry out experiments using cells of Escherichia coli (E. coli), a bacterium commonly found in the intestine of warm-blooded animals such as humans. The next part of this article discusses the short story "Our Lady of the Sauropods" (1980) by American science-fiction writer Robert Silverberg, and the novel Carnosaur (1984) by Australian novelist and film critic Harry Adam Knight (one of the pen names of John Brosnan). They were both published shortly after the discovery was made that the extinction of dinosaurs might have been caused by the impact of a meteorite 65 million years ago. In these two texts, the genetically engineered dinosaurs appear as the legitimate masters of Earth, in contrast to a human species appearing on the edge of atomic and ecologic self-destruction. The third part of the investigation moves on to Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park (1990) and its movie adaptation by Steven Spielberg. The story of Jurassic Park distinguishes itself from its predecessors by explicitly addressing the commercialization of genetic technologies. It is also the first one to imagine monstrous dinosaurs made of different strands of DNA, illustrating the fear of a natural order alienated by increasingly accessible reproductive and genetic technologies. Finally, the last section of this article focuses on the low-budget movie Carnosaur (1993), a loose adaptation of Knight's novel by American director Adam Simon. It features an artificial virus impregnating women with dinosaurs. The fate of the human species is there caught between the plan of a disillusioned geneticist and the calculation of cynical government officials irreversibly tampering with the perceived integrity of the natural world. From a single Tyrannosaur on the loose in Olsen's short story to a spreading artificial virus in Simon's movie, these stories chronicle the deep and widespread changes that genetic and reproductive technologies rapidly made on the conditions of life.

While this article ends its discussion at the beginning of the 1990s, it acknowledges that dinosaurs continue to be summoned to read into the future of genetics and society. For instance, in his book How to Build a Dinosaur (2009), paleontologist Jack Horner proposes to retro-engineer dinosaurian features in chickens by finding and activating the corresponding genes still present in their genome. According to Horner, such endeavor could serve to uncover more about genomics, to teach widely and effectively about evolution, and eventually to develop cures for genetic diseases.⁶ Since the 1970s, the genetically recreated bodies of dinosaurs have played a crucial role in the reception of genetic technologies and their effects on society and the environment. In this regard, stories of genetically engineered dinosaurs escaping their enclosure should be interpreted as a cultural phenomenon of great significance. Why dinosaurs and not any other animals or monsters? The answer lies as much in specific circumstances as in the longer cultural history of dinosaurs as both natural specimens and human artifacts.⁷ This article details the strange fortune of these fossil animals in the first decades of genetic technologies.

Once the Little Beasts Escaped from the Laboratory

In the August 1974 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Robert Olsen published "Paleontology: An Experimental Science," an unassuming short story written as a series of eight scientific articles documenting the artificial breeding of a Tyrannosaurus. Olsen is by no means the first author to have engaged with the theme of de-extinction.⁸ Nonetheless, his piece constitutes a starting point for this article for two reasons. First, it appears to be the original version of the two-tiered core narrative in which genetically reconstructed dinosaurs evade their makers. Second, it was published right after the scientific community had begun to raise procedural questions related to rDNA.

Following the 1973 Gordon Conference on Nucleic Acids held in New Hampshire, a group of concerned scientists sent a letter to the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institute of Medicine. The letter was published the same year in the journal Science by Maxine Singer of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Dieter Söll of Yale University. It stated: "we presently have the technical ability to join together, covalently, DNA molecules from diverse sources."⁹ While such ability opened exciting perspectives of unprecedented experiments, the authors advised for the creation of a committee charged with the evaluation of risks and the definition of adequate guidelines. In June 1974, Paul Berg, chair of the Committee on Recombinant DNA Molecules, called for a worldwide moratorium on a number of rDNA experiments. He clearly identified the main issue as being about containment:

There is serious concern that some of these artificial recombinant DNA molecules could prove biologically hazardous. One potential hazard in current experiments derives from the need to use a bacterium like E. coli to clone the recombinant DNA molecules and to amplify their number. Strains of E. coli commonly reside in the human intestinal tract, and they are capable of exchanging genetic information with other types of bacteria, some of which are pathogenic to man. Thus, new DNA elements introduced into E. coli might possibly become widely disseminated among human, bacterial, plant, or animal populations with unpredictable effects.¹⁰

A few months later, on October 7, 1974, the newly founded NIH Recombinant Advisory Committee (RAC) was tasked with establishing a set of guidelines ensuring that future rDNA experiments be conducted in secured settings.

"Paleontology: An Experimental Science" was published between the first warnings coming from the scientific community about rDNA and the creation of the governmental body tasked with its regulation. The story of a genetically engineered dinosaur escaping its makers as imagined by Olsen presents itself as an attempt to magnify the potential biohazards of altering bacteria living in symbiosis with humans. More than anything, the author focuses on the recklessness and opportunism of the scientists involved in the recreation of the dinosaur. Nowhere in the story are they seen discussing the ethical implications inherent to their research nor successfully anticipating necessary safety measures. Technical possibility appears to be the sole requirement to move forward with the experiment. The first three articles describe advances in genomics and computer technology allowing for the recreation of a recently discovered species of Tyrannosaurus, which fossil remains turned out to be an exceptional source of genetic material. The remaining five articles report the successive deaths of every member of the research team except for one survivor. Instead of prompting the termination of the experiment, each accident is presented as an unfortunate event largely compensated by the scientific discoveries made. The first deadly incident occurs after the temporary escape of the seven-week-old dinosaur:

Unfortunately also, the struggle to recapture the animal resulted in the tragic loss of Dr. Smizer, who was first to discover the creature's hiding place.

In conclusion, despite some difficulty, significant data are now being obtained from the specimen, which has been removed from the Paleontology Laboratory to more secure quarters at the Elephant Corral of the San Diego Zoo.¹¹

Branded as a mere "difficulty," Smizer's death is balanced by the "significant data" acquired. Olsen's dark humor reaches its highest point when the next death is described more as an opportunity to observe the dinosaur's behavior than as an irreparable loss:

The animal was able to attain the space between the inner and outer cages on December 8, resulting in the tragic death of Dr. McBride. It was reliably reported that Dr. McBride was standing at least four feet from the outer cage when the animal seized him with a foreleg and dragged him into the cage to be consumed. Since the reach of the animal's foreleg when fully extended at this stage of development was only five feet six inches, it would appear that the forelegs are more useful to the creature in food gathering than was previously thought.¹²

Failure to contain the dinosaur in an enclosure adapted to its needs eventually leads to its final escape from the San Diego Zoo. Once again, accidental casualties are mentioned, only to be outweighed by alleged scientific gain:

Although the escape of the Smizer tyrannosaurus in March of this year, involving as it did the regrettable deaths of Dr. Halloran and Dr. Eberhart, was a serious setback to the project, it did involve unparalleled opportunity to observe the habits of the creature in a more natural setting. Fortunately, the creature proved to be very much afraid of automobiles, […] the shyness on the part of the animal kept the loss of human life to a minimum.¹³

Besides the debatable claim that the San Diego area might represent "a more natural setting" from which to observe the behaviors of a dinosaur from the Cretaceous, it is the systematic justification and downgrading of human losses on the part of the scientists that constitute the leitmotiv of Olsen's satire.

The author caricatures the rational discourse of scientific communications by contrasting it with the irresponsible practices it serves to legitimize. As the sole surviving member of his team, Smith judges the experiment "totally successful,"¹⁴ though it ended with the killing by bazooka of the Tyrannosaurus. While calling for more caution regarding the choice of future animals to genetically engineer, the doctor is thrilled to announce that a specimen of early giant cave bear is currently being developed. In Olsen's short story, the engineered dinosaur represents an unmistakable source of danger, which the scientists somehow fail to recognize. While the story suggests that a bad case of libido sciendi is at the root of such a failure, the author insists on the fact that human lives are knowingly put at risk to make discoveries that have no clear and beneficial application. The short story portrays genetic engineering as the worst trade-off imaginable.

In many ways, "Paleontology: An Experimental Science" anticipates Erwin Chargaff's famous letter of 1976, which strongly criticizes the guidelines on rDNA released by the RAC: "Have we the right to counteract, irreversibly, the evolutionary wisdom of millions of years, in order to satisfy the ambition and the curiosity of a few scientists?"¹⁵ Chargaff especially stresses the impossibility to fully contain the product of rDNA on E. coli. Like Olsen, the biochemist is afraid that official and scientific forms of discourse might be used to render "palatable to the public"¹⁶ certain experiments putting human lives and their environment in jeopardy. The core narrative of genetically engineered dinosaurs escaping their makers first constituted itself against the argument that, under proper guidelines, the products of genetic manipulation could be kept isolated from the web of life. Olsen and Chargaff certainly understood how this argument would downplay the necessity of a serious ethical reflection and finally reduce it to a mere technical problem. Illustrating the danger of such reduction, Olsen provided an early and most entertaining answer to Chargaff's rhetorical question: "How can we be sure what would happen once the little beasts escaped from the laboratory?"¹⁷

It Is Only a Matter of Time Before Mankind Destroys Itself

Olsen's original narrative went through a first phase of reinterpretation in the early 1980s. While the 1974 short story imagined the recreation of a single specimen of dinosaur decimating a team of scientists and causing chaos in downtown San Diego, "Our Lady of the Sauropods" (1980) by Robert Silverberg and Carnosaur (1984) by Harry Adam Knight reinterpreted the scenario on a much larger scale. Genetically engineered dinosaurs did not simply embody the uncontainable hazards of modified bacteria anymore. In Silverberg's and Knight's texts, these creatures became symbols of mankind bringing an end to itself. Instead of explicitly warning against the lack of ethical reflection supervising genetic experiments, the early 1980s stories of dinosaurs' escape related to fears of self-destruction on a global scale. On the one hand, the apocalyptic tones of "Our Lady of the Sauropods" and Carnosaur were probably influenced by the end of the détente era and the refusal by the United States Senate to ratify the nuclear nonproliferation agreement SALT II, following the Soviet Union's military intervention in Afghanistan that began in December 1979. On the other hand, Silverberg's and Knight's texts indirectly illustrate the rise of environmental movements in the 1970s seriously criticizing the unsustainability of modern consumerism. But it was the discovery at the very end of the 1970s that the extinction of dinosaurs might have been abruptly caused by the impact of a meteorite that clearly gave these two stories their coherence. The hypothesis of an extraterrestrial cause for the sudden extinction of dinosaurs, which occurred at the end of the Cretaceous, was first published in June 1980 by a team led by Luis and Walter Alvarez.¹⁸ It did not take long for this hypothesis to spur controversies and further studies, as well as to leave its mark on popular culture.¹⁹

Indeed, Silverberg published his short story in the September 1980 issue of the science fiction magazine Omni, just a few months after the Alvarezes' groundbreaking article. "Our Lady of the Sauropods" is set in a distant future, where humans have managed to build "Dino Island," an artificial greenhouse in space, in order to study the behaviors of dinosaurs brought back to life by genetic engineering. The story is told from the point of view of Anne, a scientist who just survived the crash of her module from which she was supposed to carry out an observatory mission on the island. The concept of a security accident occurring in a highly sophisticated environment suspended in the void of space is in clear continuation with Olsen's theme of impossible containment.²⁰ Isolated and in no capacity to contact her station, Anne went from being a god-like presence to a helpless prey:

On previous trips to Dino Island I never cared about the climate. But of course I was snugly englobed in my mobile unit, a world within a world, self-contained, self-sufficient, isolated from all contact with this place and its creatures. Merely a roving eye, traveling as I pleased, invisible, invulnerable.

Can they sniff me in here?²¹

If the initial situation calls for a survival story, Silverberg tells one of revelation. First terrified at the idea of being hunted by prehistoric predators, the protagonist slowly realizes that the dinosaurs are nothing like the wild and brainless creatures they first appeared to be. After two weeks on the island, surviving on "corythosaur meat" and "fresh tyrannosaur eggs," she comes to appreciate that the dinosaurs actually share a profound telepathic bond with one another:

I saw the animals about me in a new way. As if this is not just a zoological research station, but a community, a settlement, the sole outpost of an alien civilization – an alien civilization native to earth.²²

Despite her efforts to resist this revelation and to cast it away as a mere hallucination, Anne eventually communes with the prehistoric creatures through her encounter with their matriarch, a giant Brachiosaur. Happening at night, the scene resembles a baptism. The protagonist is suddenly imbued with a renewed wisdom on the extinction of dinosaurs and the accidental rise of humanity:

They [the dinosaurs] are representatives of a dynamic, superior race, which but for a cruel cosmic accident would rule the earth to this day, and I am coming to revere them. […] Our own trifling contemptible ancestors were nothing next to them. Who knows what these dinosaurs might have achieved, if that crashing asteroid had not blotted out their light?²³

Anne reaches the climax of her conversion when she recognizes herself as the liberator of the dinosaurs. Drawing from the imagery of the Garden of Eden, Silverberg imagines the rise of a new Eve brought by fate to Dino Island to restore the original path of evolution:

I am the chosen one. I am the vehicle. I am the bringer of rebirth, the beloved one, the necessary one. […] Why have we small hairy creatures existed at all? I know now. It is so that through our technology we could make possible the return of the great ones. They perished unfairly.²⁴

In "Our Lady of the Sauropods," the genetic engineering of dinosaurs is simultaneously the greatest achievement of mankind and its ultimate demise. The story offers a counterpoint to the idea of human technology as the pinnacle of evolution by portraying it as a ruse of nature to repair the unfortunate damages caused by an asteroid millions of years ago. Silverberg replaced Olsen's sarcastic tone with a more prophetic one. In this 1980 short story, genetic technologies serve to fictionally place a pretentious, opportunistic humanity in contrast with what might have been a wiser community of living beings. The core narrative of engineered dinosaurs breaking free expresses the idea of mankind as an evolutionary and ecological misfit bound to bring an end to itself. The cosmical setting and biblical references in Silverberg's piece effectively steer the narrative toward existential grounds, which Olsen was not concerned with in his piece.

Harry Adam Knight's Carnosaur plays along the same theme of an unfit and circumstantial humanity. The novel tells the story of a small-town reporter, Pascal, uncovering the scheme of a local billionaire, Sir Darren Penward, to release genetically engineered dinosaurs into the world and have them reclaim their "rightful" place on Earth. Investigating a series of gruesome killings first attributed to exotic animals that escaped from Penward's private zoo, Pascal discovers the secret laboratory of the billionaire, along with his already extended collection of recreated dinosaurs. Caught by security guards, Pascal learns directly from Penward about his plan to repair the "injustice" of the dinosaurs' extinction. The billionaire goes to great lengths to convince his prisoner that mammals (humans, in particular) "inherited the earth – by default."²⁵ While Penward is portrayed as an eccentric billionaire compensating for his sexual impotence by resurrecting fierce predators, he is the one bringing forward contemporaneous concerns over ecological ruin, overpopulation,²⁶ and nuclear annihilation:

People don't interest me, Mr. Pascal. There are too many of them on this planet as it is. They are the least appetizing specimens of the animal kingdom – they are like some awful vermin that has spread out over the world leaving filth and pollution everywhere. […] Any fool can see that it is only a matter of time before mankind destroys itself. I predict an atomic war, either by accident or design, within a few years. It is inevitable.²⁷

The genetic recreation of dinosaurs, considered "the peak of evolution,"²⁸ is a way for Penward to even the fight between nature and mankind. In contrast to Silverberg's story, Penward does not articulate the superiority of dinosaurs in terms of their supposed ability to live harmoniously with their environment, but "in terms of power and strength."²⁹ Penward's obsession with protecting endangered species, and species of predators in particular, betrays his own sense of insecurity. Sexual frustration affects almost all the characters in the novel, and it allows Knight to spice his narrative with a few erotic scenes. What seems to be just a peripheral theme in the story is ultimately at its core. Indeed, the dinosaurs are being prematurely released by Penward's unfaithful wife, Lady Jane, in a desperate attempt to free herself from her husband. Confronting him after the fact, she explains why she decided to ruin his plan:

If I'd married a real man instead of a sick creature who can't get it up unless he's being hurt and humiliated, and even then is incapable of satisfying a woman, maybe things would have turned out differently.³⁰

While Carnosaur explicitly conveys fears of self-destruction already present in "Our Lady of the Sauropods," the novel places impaired virility and sexually unrestrained femininity at the center of the plot. The genetically engineered dinosaurs on the loose come to embody the destructive consequences of a masculinity in crisis:

The Megalosaurus, having satisfied its voracious appetite in the stock pens behind the zoo, had begun a quest to satisfy its equally powerful sexual appetite. It had wandered out of the Penward estate in a futile search for a female member of its species, mercifully unaware that over 130,000,000 years separated it from sexual satisfaction.³¹

Silverberg's and Knight's variations on the core narrative first developed by Olsen illustrate how the narrative of genetically engineered dinosaurs escaping their enclosure came to acquire an apocalyptic meaning. Both stories were heavily influenced by the contemporaneous discoveries made about not only the extinction of dinosaurs, but also their biology in general. From the early 1970s and throughout the 1980s, the scientific consensus on these animals shifted. From sluggish and ponderous reptiles, they came to be understood as more dynamic and well-adapted creatures.³² If Olsen already alluded to this shift of paradigm in his own short story, it became an effective way in the fictions of the 1980s to highlight the unsustainability of mankind. Concurrently, the accidental extinction at the end of the Cretaceous served as a topos to account for the paradox of evolution "culminating" in a species, Homo sapiens, so prone to self-destruction. Silverberg and Knight expanded Olsen's narrative and turned genetically engineered dinosaurs into messengers of an imminent geopolitical and ecological collapse.

The Old Days Are Gone

Recreating dinosaurs for entertainment is almost as old as the concept of dinosaur itself. British paleontologist Richard Owen, who coined the term "Dinosauria" in the 1840s, partnered with artist Benjamin W. Hawkins to exhibit life-sized sculptures of some of these animals at the Crystal Palace in 1854.³³ Sixty years later, American cartoonist Winsor McCay released Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), a short animated film featuring a sauropod performing tricks like a circus animal. In the following decades, the dinosaurs of special-effect artists Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen roamed the screens of movie theaters in productions like The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933), and One Million Years B.C. (1966).³⁴ In Olsen's short story, the engineered Tyrannosaurus is being transported to the San Diego Zoo. At the beginning of "Our Lady of the Sauropods," the reader learns that some people are discussing the possibility of opening Dino Island to the public to finance scientific research.³⁵ Finally, at the end of Carnosaur, when Penward's dinosaurs have been exterminated, one specimen of young Brachiosaur is kept alive in the hope that it will make "quite a tourist attraction if it survives to adulthood."³⁶

So, when Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park (1990), he was contributing to an already well-established tradition of dinosaurs as beasts of spectacle. Nonetheless, Crichton's story is the first one to combine this tradition with Olsen's more recent theme of genetically engineered dinosaurs on the loose. By doing so, the novelist created an ominous tale in response to the growing business of genetic technologies and gene patenting. In the introduction to his novel, Crichton reports that "by 1986, at least 362 scientists, including 64 in the National Academy, sat on the advisory board of biotech firms."³⁷ An article published in Nature contended that, until a single NIH researcher requested patents for 337 human genes at once in June 1991, "gene patenting was business as usual."³⁸ Dustin Iler has shown how Jurassic Park corresponds to a transition, occurring between the 1980s and 1990s, from fears of global nuclear annihilation to fears of life being altered from within by the powerful combination of capital and genomics.³⁹

Indeed, Crichton's rogue dinosaurs are distinguishable from their predecessors as the products not only of genetic engineering but also of a nonregulated market allowing for the commodification of genetic material and technologies. If Olsen worried that the biological integrity of humans and their environment would be sacrificed to the curiosity of the scientific community, Crichton was concerned with the fact that such sacrifice was apparently being made "for profit."⁴⁰ While the character of the eccentric billionaire Penward in Carnosaur somewhat prefigures the entrepreneur John Hammond in Jurassic Park, the two men could not be more different. Penward is a frustrated misanthrope using his financial capital to plot the complete destruction of mankind; Hammond is an eccentric visionary looking to create the ultimate attraction to entertain the children of the world. The show-business mind of Hammond is an allegoric representation of Crichton's worry over the entanglement of capital with genomics. In Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993), this worry has been essentialized, and the story turned into an exciting morality tale condemning greed.⁴¹

Besides its critique of the biotech industry, Jurassic Park is characterized by a sense of nostalgia. Crichton's novel and Spielberg's movie juxtapose the present with a better, idealized time coming to an end: a time, for example, when science remained an endeavor relatively pure of economic interests;⁴² when paleontologist dug the earth with the strength of their arms, instead of using probes and computers;⁴³ and, most importantly, when all new life was conceived "naturally." About the latter point, Laura Briggs and Jodi Kelber-Kay have highlighted how Jurassic Park's warning against genetic technologies simultaneously portrayed non-heterosexuality as a threat to the perceived natural and social order.⁴⁴ Such an analysis has the merit of pointing us toward what might be the most original characteristic of Jurassic Park's genetically engineered dinosaurs. While Olsen, Silverberg, and Knight assumed the possibility of the recreation of actual dinosaurs, Crichton imagines creatures resulting from combining fragmented dinosaurian DNA with segments of batrachian DNA to fill in the "gaps." Before Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs escaping their enclosure might have been dangerous animals, but they remained supposedly genuine specimens of prehistoric species. On the contrary, the identity of Hammond's dinosaurs is much more problematic, if not monstrous. This point is explicitly made in the novel, when Hammond and his chief geneticist, Henry Wu, argue over the "reality" of the engineered dinosaurs:

Hammond sighed. "Now, Henry, are we going to have another one of those abstract discussions? You know I like to keep it simple. The dinosaurs we have now are real, and –"

"Well, not exactly," Wu said. He paced the living room, pointed to the monitors. "I don't think we should kid ourselves. We haven't re-created the past here. The past is gone. It can never be re-created. What we've done is reconstruct the past – or at least a version of the past. And I am saying we can make a better version."

"Better than real?"

"Why not?" Wu said. "After all, these animals are already modified. We've inserted genes to make them patentable, and to make them lysine dependent. And we've done everything we can to promote growth, and accelerate development into adulthood."⁴⁵

In Crichton's version of the core narrative, genetic engineering does not simply constitute a threat for human beings and their environment but tears the very fabric of reality by making the natural indistinguishable from the artificial. Jurassic Park's nostalgia refers to a time when something like a natural order could still be easily recognized and mobilized as a social norm. The fact that the presumed all-female dinosaurs turned out to be hermaphrodites able to reproduce symbolizes this irreversible departure from a regrated past.⁴⁶ This focus on reproduction in the story has most certainly been inspired by the recent call from certain paleontologists to seriously take into consideration the sexuality of dinosaurs to understand their physiology and evolution.⁴⁷ Robert Bakker, for example, argued that the reluctance to refer to sex when analyzing dinosaur skeletons had been seriously limiting the scope of possible interpretations. Concurrently, the spectacular discovery of well-preserved dinosaurs' nests in Montana by Jack Horner, who eventually served as a scientific consultant for Jurassic Park, spurred even more interest in dinosaurs' sexual and gregarious behaviors.⁴⁸

Nevertheless, these circumstances alone do not explain why Jurassic Park's dinosaurs are queer, thereby challenging the stability of a world presumably defined by heterosexuality.⁴⁹ Along with their obvious anachronism, the dinosaurs' hermaphrodism is presented in the story as a dangerous "deviancy" relative to the alleged heteronormativity of the natural order.⁵⁰ Hammond's strategy to artificially regulate the specimen population in the park by only engineering females relied on this assumption. Jurassic Park's catastrophe expresses concerns over how the development of genetic engineering and other reproductive technologies might produce an alternative, queer nature eventually undermining the present social order. In an exchange between Hammond and the chaos theorist Ian Malcolm occurring around the end of the novel, the reader comes to understand that Jurassic Park's experiment does not ultimately put the natural world in jeopardy, but solely the human world:

Hammond seemed to revive, and began bustling around, straightening up. "Well," he said, "at least disaster is averted."

"What disaster is that?" Malcolm said, sighing.

"Well," Hammond said, "they didn't get free and overrun the world." […]

"You egomaniacal idiot," Malcolm said in fury. "Do you have any idea what you are talking about? You think you can destroy the planet? My, what intoxicating power you must have." Malcolm sank back on the bed. "You can't destroy this planet. You can't even come close."⁵¹

After having given Hammond a brief lecture on the three-billion-year history of life, Malcolm emphatically concludes: "But the earth would survive our folly. Life would survive our folly."⁵² The hermaphrodite dinosaurs on the loose embody such "folly." Jurassic Park's nostalgia arises from the fact that it tells the story of a disaster already happening. If this disaster is, in the foreground, identified as the commercialization of genetic technologies, the representation of its consequences through sexually "abnormal" beings taps, in the background, into contemporaneous anxiety over the erosion of traditional sexual and gender norms.⁵³ Jurassic Park's catastrophic scenario of hermaphrodite dinosaurs running loose and threatening the stability of the human world exemplifies the "fear of a queer planet,"⁵⁴ which an eponymous volume of essays edited by Michael Warner addressed the same year Spielberg's blockbuster came out in theaters. The genetically engineered dinosaurs from the 1980s were announcing the geopolitical and ecological suicide of mankind. The ones from the 1990s were responding both to the increasing commercialization of genomics and to the political and conceptual challenges brought against heteronormativity.⁵⁵

Right Now, Your Body Is an Evolutionary Battlefield

Just a few weeks prior to the release of Spielberg's Jurassic Park in June 1993, a low-budget adaptation of Knight's Carnosaur was shown in some regional theaters across the United States. Written and directed by Adam Simon, the movie tells a rather different story from the novel and should, therefore, be considered as an original variation of the core-narrative tracing back to Olsen's 1975 short story. To identify the originality of that variation more easily, key similarities between the novel and the movie must be underlined. Simon retained the idea of a character plotting the destruction of the human species using genetically engineered dinosaurs. The justification for this plan is identical to the one Penward gives in the novel: mankind is an ecological disaster that needs to be eradicated to preserve life on Earth. To illustrate this sense of urgency, the movie is punctuated with references to intensive animal farming and the overconsumption of meat. For instance, the opening credit scene shows images of decapitated chickens hanging upside down on a mechanized line. Later in the movie, a dinosaur is seen eating a human leg while holding it like a drumstick. The escaped dinosaurs serve here as a less-than-subtle metaphor for the destructive agency of the average consumer, a "carnosaur" in its own right. According to the short paragraph that W. J. T. Mitchell dedicates to the movie in his seminal essay The Last Dinosaur Book (1998), the sickening spectacle of unsustainable modes of production and consumption is the focal point of Simon's Carnosaur.⁵⁶

Nevertheless, an even more important theme in the movie is the development of reproductive technologies, particularly reprogenetics.⁵⁷ Simon made several significant changes to Knight's story. First, the character of Penward was replaced by a geneticist, Dr. Jane Tiptree,⁵⁸ who is consumed with guilt for having contributed to the ecological disaster. The spectator learns at the very beginning of the movie that she used to work for the government on more aggressive genetic alternatives to pesticide. This backstory, inspired by the first applications of genetically modified organisms in food production at the end of the 1980s in the United States,⁵⁹ helps us understand how Tiptree's plan cannot be compared to the one developed by the sexually frustrated Penward. Instead of genetically engineering dinosaurs to start a war of extermination against a misfit human species, Tiptree developed a lethal virus targeting primarily women, which she released by infecting chickens. Before killing its female hosts, the virus impregnates them with a rapidly developing dinosaur. Therefore, the consequences of the virus's spread are twofold. First, it exterminates the human female population, rendering the reproduction of the species impossible. Secondly, it directly replaces humans with dinosaurs. The movie counts a couple of scenes showing fevered women painfully laying dinosaur eggs before expiring. Tiptree herself is seen giving birth to a Tyrannosaurus-like chick that, instead of hatching from an egg, emerges right out of her belly in a way reminiscent of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). However, this kind of obvious inconsistency in the script should not refrain us from analyzing how these genetically engineered dinosaurs might resemble and differ from the ones in the previous stories considered.

Much like in Jurassic Park, the engineered dinosaurs are not genuine specimens of the prehistoric past; they are monsters. But while Hammond's dinosaurs could be labelled as "accidental monsters," Tiptree intended her creatures to be different from the animals that inhabited Earth millions of years ago. By using women as vessels for their birth, her goal is to create a hybrid species of beings combining both dinosaurian and human DNA. Tiptree is not looking to eradicate humanity, but to give a second chance to the genetic potential mankind has, according to her, been wasting in its present form. Confessing her plan to the lead character, who discovered her secret laboratory, she explains that "all of the potential for greatness in man is in the DNA, and just a pinch of it goes very far in the mix." Pointing at the dinosaur eggs behind her, she repeats with an intelligent look: "in the mix."⁶⁰ The engineered dinosaurs in Carnosaur are not simply metaphors for the modern, irresponsible consumer. As the product of an experiment targeting the bodies of women, they also should be connected to the power struggles over pregnancy⁶¹ and the development of reproductive technologies in the last decades of the century.

Indeed, the movie depicts government officials who decide to respond to Tiptree's plan with a eugenic scheme of their own. The scheme consists in letting the women die of the virus to then "breed a new generation of females"⁶² by using artificial wombs. The end of the movie prefigures a decisive confrontation between Tiptree's hybrid dinosaurs and "a new, stronger breed"⁶³ of human beings. The woman's body and its reproductive capability are getting caught in the crossfire. As Tiptree says to her assistant, who is infected by the virus and about to go into labor: "Right now, your body is an evolutionary battlefield."⁶⁴ The idea of the woman's body being a disputed ground echoes the contemporaneous debate over reproductive technologies and how they might enhance or restrict women's freedom. In 1993, the year of the movie's release, ethics professor Janice G. Raymond published Women as Wombs, a controversial essay arguing that the current system of reproductive technologies reinforces the objectification of women around the world. In her words:

New reproductive arrangements are presented as a woman's private choice. But they are publicly sanctioned violence against women. The absoluteness of this privatized perspective, especially as emphasized by the medical profession and the media, who present women as having unconditioned free will, functions as a smoke screen for medical experimentation and, ultimately, for the violation of women's bodies. […] The language of choice is compelling because it highlights a freedom that many women seldom have and a cafeteria of options disguised as self-determination.⁶⁵

In Simon's Carnosaur, women are unambiguously the victims of reprogenetics. However, the movie does not make any particular social or political statement. In fact, it relies on a very persistent representation of the pregnant body as abnormal and sick, which needs to be regulated to prevent chaos.⁶⁶ Women laying eggs and giving birth to genetically engineered dinosaurs resembles the kind of surrealist scenes the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch imagined for his iconic depiction of hell in the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Vicious predators coming out of women's wombs can be seen as a modern take on the vagina dentata, or vagina with teeth, an even older representation of the female sexual organ as dangerous and obscene.⁶⁷

Despite its inconsistencies and unconvincing special effects, compared to the ones displayed in Spielberg's Jurassic Park, the movie adaptation of Carnosaur is a brand-new version of the core narrative this article discusses. Having escaped from a laboratory, a zoo, a space greenhouse, and a theme park, the dinosaurs, in this movie, are finally transgressing the most intimate boundary: the human body. From Olsen's satirical piece to Spielberg's blockbuster, the genetically engineered dinosaurs threatened humans from the outside. In Carnosaur, the threat operates from the inside, alienating the biological integrity of human females, thereby compromising the species' survival. Addressing her agonizing assistant, Tiptree explains: "Right now, the genetic text of your very being is being rewritten."⁶⁸ The dinosaurian/human creatures engineered by the disillusioned geneticist embody how, by the end of the century, genetics had drastically altered the understanding of individual and collective identities.⁶⁹ In Carnosaur, the engineered dinosaurs' identity is ambivalent. If they are mankind's nemesis, they also represent a second chance for humanity's assumed—and undefined—"greatness." Daydreaming, Tiptree muses:

Just imagine a hundred million years from now … a green fertile planet … with peaceful beings … possibilities of the creative spirit and intuitive genius of the human mind weighted to the power and the durability of the greatest creatures that were ever to walk, swim or fly across the face of the planet.⁷⁰

The description of this idealized future is followed by a violent confrontation between a county sheriff and a dinosaur, who end up killing each other. Such a contrast between the anticipated long-term benefits and the imminent hazard of a genetic experiment illustrates the kind of mixed reception an endeavor like the Human Genome Project received after its official launch in 1990.⁷¹ While the perspective of mapping the genetic code of humanity carried hopes of significant medical advancements⁷² and further international collaboration,⁷³ it also raised several concerning issues, such as the development of discrete forms of eugenics,⁷⁴ and the rise of genetic discrimination.⁷⁵ Escaping from human wombs, Carnosaur's genetically engineered dinosaurs bear witness to how deeply, for better and worse, genomics and genetic engineering had already affected everybody's life by the end of the millennium.

Conclusion

From the 1970s dinosaur-lab-rat imagined by Olsen to the 1990s genetic monsters of Jurassic Park and Carnosaur, the engineered dinosaurs have proven to be incredibly adaptable creatures. In none of these stories do they function as ready-made symbols or metaphors. Instead, their successive versions provide a unique perspective on how the concerns related to genetic engineering evolved during the first 20 years of this technology. From Olsen's small satirical piece to Crichton's bestseller and Spielberg's blockbuster, the core narrative of genetically engineered dinosaurs escaping their makers became a compelling, classic storyline. As of today, this core narrative remains a part of Western societies' cultural repertoire. One only needs to consider the success of the Jurassic World franchise introduced in 2015. Stories of genetically engineered dinosaurs escaping their enclosure, breaking free from the control of their engineers, and threatening the lives of human beings have been "speaking" to the public for almost half a century. Why did dinosaurs appear as appropriate characters to embody the growing concerns related to genetic engineering? After all, Dr. Smith, at the end of "Paleontology: An Experimental Science," alluded to the upcoming recreation of a prehistoric cave bear. Why did Olsen decide to develop his story around a dinosaur instead of a cave bear? The emergence of genetically engineered dinosaurs as birds of ill omen owes much to a very specific context. While major breakthroughs were being made in genetic and reproductive technologies between the 1970s and the 1990s with, for instance, the development of rDNA, in vitro fertilization, transgenic crops, and gene mapping, breakthrough discoveries were also being made about the physiology, evolution, and sudden extinction of dinosaurs. Beginning in the 1970s, the study of ancient DNA recovered from fossil remains began to inspire various de-extinction projects, eventually leading to the formation of the Extinct DNA Study Group in 1983.⁷⁶ The publicity surrounding genomics and dinosaur paleontology at the end of the millennium provided a favorable context for the emergence of genetically engineered dinosaurs as fictional creatures able to encapsulate major social and technological transformations.

Even before the 1970–1990 period, dinosaurs had already achieved the status of cultural icons. In other words, they certainly appeared to authors and movie directors as a safe and lucrative choice to make. They had already been featured in countless works of fiction staging anachronic and almost always conflictual encounters with humans. In his essay on dinosaurs in popular culture, paleontologist José Luis Sanz identifies three different kinds of fictional conflict between humans and dinosaurs: (1) prehistoric humans and dinosaurs live in "natural" synchrony, (2) humans discover a place where dinosaurs have managed to survive, and (3) dinosaurs are brought to or invade the civilized world. About the latter, which corresponds to the core narrative this article has been tackling, Sanz explains that "the appearance of a dinosaur in civilized human societies always means a serious disruption of order at various levels."⁷⁷ This is most certainly true about the stories of dinosaurs brought back through genetic engineering. In Olsen's short story, for example, the introduction of a dinosaur points toward the dangerous lack of ethical debate within the scientific community. In Knight's novel, dinosaurs are set free because one eccentric billionaire is not seen as a "real man" by his wife. There, the intrusion of dinosaurs in the human world is in direct reaction to the disruption of traditional gender norms. Based on Sanz's categories, the stories discussed in this article seem to perpetuate a much older tradition of using dinosaurs as agents of disorder.

Nonetheless, this perspective does not consider how the dinosaurs arrive in the civilized world. Whether the dinosaurs are brought back from a mysterious island, as in The Lost World (1925) by Harry Hoyt, or through genetic engineering, the assumption is that the story is always one of a fight against nature. The limitation of this view appears clearly in the way Sanz discusses the final scene of the movie Carnosaur, where the main character defeats one of Tiptree's dinosaurs with an excavator:

The digger is nothing other than a metal extension of the bones and muscle of the person controlling it. It is an extension generated thanks to human science, which is what finally does away with the beast. […] Thus, the process of confrontation with the dinosaur and its death have to be understood as a further triumph of the human intellect over Nature, a theme that has run through various mythologies since the beginnings of culture.⁷⁸

While Sanz is right to see in this duel a scene reminiscent of older myths, such as the slaying of a dragon by Saint Michael, his suggestion that this confrontation should "be understood as a further triumph of human intellect over Nature" should be taken with a grain of salt. Indeed, in Carnosaur, as in all the stories previously discussed, the dinosaurs are not the product of nature. Their escape from their enclosure catalyzes a situation wherein humans are facing the dangers of their own technological abilities. In none of these stories did humans successfully contain the engineered dinosaurs, and if they seemed to have done so, such as in Olsen's piece, it is the desire to recreate more of these creatures that cannot be contained. Far from representing a nature to defeat, the genetically engineered dinosaurs on the loose embody the rising inability to decisively distinguish the natural from the technological. The genetically engineered dinosaurs on the loose bear witness to the rise of—and the resistance against—the difficult task of thinking beyond such traditional, paradigmatic dichotomies.

Beginning in the 1970s, fascinating creatures, known only from fossil fragments and traces, were fictionally bred to figure out a world wherein the very building blocks of life, sequences of DNA, could now be isolated, mapped, and rearranged. The fragmented deep past, popularly exemplified by dinosaurs, became the screen on which fears related to the future fragmentation and reinvention of life could be projected.⁷⁹