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First Iteration: The Shape of the Data
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
Alan Grant painstakingly excavates a tiny, fossilized skeleton from the limestone, oblivious to the heat and uncomfortable position in which he crouches. In the distance, someone calls his name. In the present, heat, dust, and wind fill these barren and rocky Montana badlands. But in his mind’s eye, Grant can see the swampy shoreline of the ancient inland sea that covered much of the United States millions of years earlier. In that distant, distant past, an island in that lake provided a sanctuary for duck-billed dinosaurs to lay their eggs and raise their young. Someone calls his name again, breaking his reverie. In the distance, Ellie Sattler beckons him to camp. They have a visitor.
In contrast to the greedy and dangerous scientists criticized in the introduction, Grant and Ellie pursue scientific discovery for love, not for money. They put up with discomfort and difficulty for the reward of an opportunity to uncover minute details about dinosaurs and their lives on earth. When Grant considers the vast changes that time, geology, and environmental processes have wrought on the earth, he reminds readers of how little humans truly know or understand about the nature of their planet.
Themes
Massive worldwide changes like deforestation and global warming make the knowledge of paleontologists like Dr. Grant increasingly valuable, and he’s used to providing his expertise. On this day, Bob Morris, a young lawyer from the Environmental Protection Agency, wants to talk to him. Morris expresses surprise that the paleontologists use tipis for shelter, but Grant assures him that nothing else works as well. Modern tents blow away, but tipis modeled on the shelters made by the Blackfoot tribes who once lived in the badlands best survive the winds.
The team’s tipis represent another vestige of the past—the shelters used by the land’s indigenous inhabitants stand the test of time and outperform modern tents. This shows how Grant and his team attend carefully to the lessons of the past. It also suggests that modern technology isn’t necessarily better than the older ways of doing things, especially when it fails to respond appropriately to the conditions.
Themes
Grant teaches paleontology at the University of Denver, but he prefers fieldwork and has little patience for social niceties or the cerebral work of academics and museum curators afraid to get their hands dirty. Morris gets right to the point: he’s investigating the Hammond Foundation, which generously contributes to Grant’s expeditions and for which Grant has served as consultant. John Hammond, a wealthy, eccentric “dinosaur nut” funds many paleontological projects, Grant explains. Morris notes that Hammond only funds digs in the northern reaches of the globe; that he has amassed the largest privately-held stock of amber in the world; and that he purchased an island off the cost of Costa Rica.
In investigating the Hammond Foundation from afar, Bob Morris can only carefully study the vestiges of their activities. His attempt to discern InGen’s research activities parallels Grant’s attempts to figure out how dinosaurs lived based on the scanty evidence of their fossilized remains. Both investigations suggest that true understanding requires careful attention to even the smallest pieces of evidence and point to the difficulty of drawing correct conclusions based on incomplete evidence.
Themes
Grant specializes in the rearing behavior of dinosaurs, following his discovery of a clutch of eggs at a Montana dig in 1979 and his massively appealing hypothesis that dinosaurs possessed maternal instincts. He tells Morris that, as a consultant to InGen, he mostly talked with a lawyer named Donald Gennaro on the phone. The company offered Grant $50,000—enough to support two full summers of fieldwork—to write up his previously unpublished findings on “nesting behavior, territorial ranges, feeding behavior [and] social behavior” of the dinosaurs he’d studied. Grant recalls that, although Gennaro claimed he was researching a children’s museum exhibit, he would call up with oddly specific, strangely urgent questions at all hours of the day and night. Grant got tired of it and revoked the consultancy in 1985, after which the Hammond Foundation started to support his work annually.
Grant’s paleontological research demonstrates his ability to gain insight by careful observation, which yielded insights about dinosaur behavior based on a handful of bones and fossilized nests. It’s this expertise that the InGen taps when they hire him as a consultant. InGen’s success in breeding and rearing dinosaurs in their lab proves the accuracy of many of Grant’s theories. This shows how insight and understanding depend on careful attention. And while Grant does his research for love, his digs are still expensive, and John Hammond can exert control over him with the promise of necessary funding.
Themes
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Although he has no proof, Morris feels certain that John Hammond is “evading the law.” He came under suspicion when his company transferred three incredibly powerful computers and 24 automated gene sequencers to a remote island near Costa Rica. These actions sparked concern since they seem to have established a genetic engineering facility in a country with no regulation. This has happened before, most notably the Biosyn Rabies case of 1986, in which a biotech firm tested a rabies vaccine on Chilean farm workers without their full consent. And they genetically modified the rabies virus to be capable of airborne spread. Thanks to political distraction and commercial pressures, Biosyn faced no accountability, and the geneticist in charge of the project, Lewis Dodgson, still works for them.
Morris clearly suggests that Hammond purchased the island to evade oversight and control over InGen’s research. The case of Biosyn illustrates the dangers of unregulated technological and scientific research. It recalls historical abuses of unwitting subjects, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis study—for which none of the scientists involved were held accountable. But it also incorporates the powers unlocked by genetic sequencing and modification, which in theory can be used to make deadly viruses, like rabies, even more dangerous.
Themes
Despite his gut feeling that John Hammond is skirting regulatory oversight in a similarly dangerous way, Morris admits that he lacks the evidence to continue the investigation. As his conversation with Grant draws to a close, they can hear Ellie answer the phone at the other end of the trailer. Grant assures Morris that the team has never given Hammond physical materials like bones or eggs. They send pieces that are too fragmented for museum preservation to a lab for genetic analysis.
Grant’s final exchange with Morris provides another breadcrumb for the lawyer as he tries to piece together a picture of Hammond’s activities; the current state of technology allows scientists to extract genetic material from fossilized dinosaur bones for identification purposes. And Morris’s question seems to indicate that Hammond might have asked for such DNA-rich material from other paleontologists.
Themes
As he walks out the door, Morris asks Grant what else InGen could have done with the information he gave them if they weren’t making a museum exhibit. Laughing, Grant replies they could have fed a baby hadrosaur. A dejected Morris climbs into his car. As he and Ellie laugh over the idea of John Hammond being a sinister arch villain, Grant asks who called. Ellie names the caller as Alice Levin, a scientist in New York who wants a call back right away.
Grant accidentally stumbles onto the truth but finds it so implausible that he only offers it as a humorous hypothesis to Morris. The two men have all the evidence necessary, but they lack the insight—or the vision—to image that anyone would actually try to secretly clone dinosaurs. And the section ends by teasing whatever urgent information the scientist in New York has to share with Grant.
Themes
