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Second Iteration: Choteau
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Jurassic Park, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Chaos, Change, and Control
Sight and Insight
Flawed Human Nature
Technology
Summary
Analysis
In California, the Biosyn Corporation has called its board of directors to an emergency meeting chaired by Lewis Dodgson. Dodgson, either the most reckless or fearless geneticist of his generation, doesn’t care about proper protocols or getting informed consent from his experimental subjects. His rabies vaccine experiment earned him the job of head of product development—really, head of corporate espionage—at Biosyn. It’s the 1980s, and these biotech firms want to capitalize on consumer interest and spending rather than enhancing health or human welfare. Biosyn’s breakthroughs are marketable, even if they have questionable worth, like engineering paler, more visible trout for fishermen in Idaho.
Biosyn’s 1980s, “go big or go home” attitude exemplifies the need for oversight and regulation of biotechnology firms as the technology they wield grows ever more powerful and potentially dangerous. At this point in the novel, it seems like Dodgson, with his obvious disregard for health and human safety or for the boundaries of ethical business practices, seems to offer a pointed contrast to the less evil John Hammond. But in reality, both men respond to the same motivations of greed and control, with equally dangerous consequences.
Themes
When the final board member finally arrives, Dodgson presents the company’s next “target of opportunity,” InGen. He tells board members about Biosyn’s ongoing surveillance of InGen as it courted investors then purchased supercomputers, gene sequencers, unusual amounts of amber, and the island. But they could not guess what InGen was up to until they acquired a small plastics company that innovated a plastic that could be used to make functional synthetic eggs. This, combined with the massive infrastructure projects on Isla Nublar, hinted that InGen had figured out how to clone “animals that hatch from eggs” and “require a lot of room in a zoo”—dinosaurs.
As it turns out, Bob Morris and the EPA weren’t the only ones surveilling John Hammond and InGen. But what appeared opaque and confusing to them presents a clear and legible pattern to Lewis Dodgson, since his knowledge base includes the necessary technical information to understand how the amber, supercomputers, and synthetic eggs could be connected. This passage thus suggests that insight requires looking at the evidence along with the knowledge to interpret it correctly.
Themes
The board members express extreme surprise, much to Dodgson’s annoyance. Scientists have discussed cloning dinosaurs—at least theoretically—since the early 1980s. Finding DNA poses a challenge, but now that scientists have proven that fossilization doesn’t destroy DNA, one could, in theory, grind up huge quantities of dinosaur bones to extract the necessary sequences. InGen seems to have set itself this impossibly difficult task. And as a result, they’re about to have “the greatest single tourist attraction in the history of the world” in addition to cornering the market on domestic dinosaur production. Biosyn could follow suit and make its own dinosaurs, but it would be years behind InGen. Instead, Dodgson proposes an act of corporate espionage. He’s cultivated a source at InGen who will, for a price, acquire the necessary genetic material for them to quickly reverse engineer the technology.
Jurassic Park is a work of speculative fiction, meaning that it builds on historical trends and current developments to extrapolate a plausible—if unlikely—version of the future. The technologies the book presents draw from real developments in the 1970s and 1980s to help build the novel’s argument that the immense power that cracking the code of DNA will give humans requires careful and ethical research overseen by disinterested bodies. Otherwise, the future might hold ill-conceived and dangerous experiments designed for entertainment and enrichment rather than humanitarian ends. The corporate competition between InGen and Biosyn further dramatizes the dangers of a powerful and competitive—but underregulated—industry.
Themes
