The Science of Jurassic Park and the Lost World: Or, How to Build a Dinosaur - Hardcover
Could it really happen? Could modern scientists using cutting-edge laboratory techniques really clone living, breathing, hungry dinosaurs & populate a true-to-life Jurassic Park? This is a fun-filled romp to that outer edge where the science fiction of today is approaching the hard science of tomorrow. You ll explore the possibilities with two scientists intimately familiar with this world. A book that fans of Jurassic Park, The Lost World, & dinosaur devotees everywhere will relish. Includes fascinating facts & factoids -- even movie bloopers. Photos & drawings.
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Review:
The premise of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and the Steven Spielberg movie that it spawned (along with its sequel, The Lost World) is simple enough. Scientists extract dinosaur DNA remnants lingering in the stomachs of insects entombed in amber for millions of years, reconstitute them into complete copies of dinosaur DNA, and then "grow" dinosaurs inside the lab. It sounds intuitively plausible--if far-fetched--but could it really work? In this fascinating book, Rob DeSalle and David Lindley explain in detail how scientists might attempt this painstaking task and the challenges they would face. In the process, they provide a running tutorial on the techniques of genetic engineering and play spoilsport to the occasional sloppy science of the Crichton and Spielberg works. The result is thoroughly entertaining yet simultaneously enlightening.
From Kirkus Reviews:
Physicist Lindley (The End of Physics, 1993) and DeSalle, a DNA-in-amber expert at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, have a fine time taking to task the tangled web Michael Crichton has spun in his Jurassic Park books and movies. Rather than producing a smug put-down, however, they provide a fine guide to the perplexed on genetic engineering and evolution. For a start, they point out that warm tropical islands off the coast of Costa Rica may have Technicolor charm but are the wrong places to look for really old amber (65 million years at least, if you want dino DNA). You're better off in New Jersey! But that's a minor detail. All of the clever gene amplification methods today would not be enough to reconstruct all you need to know to fashion your favorite brontosaurus or velociraptor from what could be recovered from a mosquito in a chunk of amber. To understand why, the authors review what we know about fossils, about dinosaurs, and about manipulating DNA. They explain how to extract DNA, map and sequence it, identify genes, and make comparisons across species. Even presuming that the DNA recovered miraculously contains a full dinosaur recipe, the next hurdle would be to puzzle out where to grow it; you need a receptive egg and egg-layer. And other problems follow: How would a dinosaur, without parents, learn to behave like a dinosaur? There is, perhaps, a little overkill here, as the authors indulge in the numbers game of how much land (and food) it would take to maintain the dinosaurs described in the books. Not that they are total skeptics: Recent headlines, after all, have demonstrated the spectacular possibilities of cloning. If, as they say, everything in life is a matter of timing, DeSalle and Lindley could hardly have brought out a book at a more propitious time. (illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBasic Books
- Publication date1997
- ISBN 10 0788159364
- ISBN 13 9780788159367
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages194
- Rating
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