Consider the T-Rex, De-Extinction’s Favorite Icon

Image: Photo by Allan Ramirez: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-large-t-rex-skeleton-is-displayed-in-a-museum-26898336/

Because de-extinction as a concept oscillates between science fiction and science, the T-Rex is emblematic of the enterprise.

Welcome to Jurassic Park

Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park (1990) is about a Barnumesque businessman who builds an isolated island theme park replete with resurrected dinosaurs, including at least one enormous and hungry T-Rex. The novel provided not only the source material for one of the most successful movie franchises of all time, but also a widely recognized popular metaphor for the emerging science of de-extinction.

In Crichton’s imaginary landscape, dinosaurs are brought back to life by scientists who extract dinosaur DNA from fossilized amber and mix it with frog embryos in a lab. The smug lead scientist assures us that only females are being brought back, so there is absolutely no chance of accidentally kick-starting a new dinosaur population that is sixty-five billion years out of time.

The catch, of course, as the bemused chaos theoretician reminds us (taking a bit of scientific license), is that frogs are hermaphroditic and can therefore take either the male or female sex role in reproduction, ergo . . . well, one need only wait for the unforeseen but inevitable disaster to ensue.

Jurassic Park on the Cusp of the Biotechnological Age

Jurassic Park captured the anxieties of a society in which major recent initiatives such as the Human Genome Project focused mass attention on both the promise and ethics of biotechnological research. While Crichton may not have gotten every scientific detail right, the novel expertly mixes the serious and the popular, resurrecting tropes from iconic sources such as The Lost World (1912) and popcorn sci-fi movies such as the delightful King Dinosaur (1955).

Crichton’s work also respectfully tips the hat to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Indeed, popular discussion of de-extinction is full of Frankenstein moments. Douglas McCauley, an ecologist at UC-Barbara, argues in a discussion of a woolly mammoth project that de-extinction is far enough along the technical trajectory that “it’s a bit like finishing the last stiches after creating Frankenstein’s Monster — and suddenly we pause for a moment and start to think about whether we should really switch on the power and bring that thing to life” (*https://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/article166329856/Synthetic-biology-Extinction-was-yesterday.html).*

Everything Has to be Perfect

In one sense, de-extinction research takes place in the most immaculate of scientific spaces. As one article on George Church’s woolly mammoth research at Harvard University notes, “the mammoth sleeps tight in a closet. It’s completely dark in there, moist, comfortably warm, with low oxygen content, just like in a uterus. It is frequently monitored; everything in the closet has to be perfect, concerning temperature and air composition” (ibid).

Yet, at the same time, the idea of de-extinction is uncanny, even gothic. It juxtaposes an environmentally bleak future with scientific derring-do, as ethical, social, and political dilemmas disrupt the narrative at every turn. For example, in real life, dinosaur DNA is so old and degraded, and its natural environment so out of joint with ours, that the prospect of bringing one back via gene editing or cloning is essentially nil.

Yet to object to Jurassic Park because it is not “real” is akin to dismissing George Orwell’s dystopian novel Animal Farm on the grounds that animals cannot speak English. These novels and movies channel the anxieties produced by technological advances. They do not need to be painstakingly accurate to highlight social concerns about unlocking biological processes, scientific hubris, or technological trajectories that rapidly develop unanticipated pathways of their own.

The Sound of Old T-Rex

Dinosaurs make for potent movie monsters, it is true, but the prospect of being able to generate life on demand did not spring into being in the mid-20th century. It tracks back to the very beginning of the modern biological enterprise, when scientists like Jacques Loeb first began to interfere in the chemical processes of life.

The de-extinction project is simultaneously promissory and nostalgic, looking to use highly advanced technologies to resuscitate past ecosystems and dreamscapes. The promises made by proponents take us back to herds of mammoths and flocks of passenger pigeons, and, however implausibly, to the T-Rex.

Think of Jurassic Park, again. Steven Spielberg is a genius, so he knew that the audience needed to hear the T-Rex before we saw it. The classic six-minute scene begins with the first visitors to Jurassic Park sitting stranded in their flimsy electric cars (the power has gone out), hot and bored, vaguely irritated by the conspicuous absence of all those marauding monsters that they had been promised.

Then, the precocious kid in the car hears a distant rhythmic stomping sound that reverberates under the ground and causes the water glasses on the dashboard to shake. He motions to everyone in the car to stop moving and listen. We hear a creaking gate and falling trees and then see an enormous avian claw slide back from the gate into the enclosure. A few micro-seconds tick by, the gate falls, and then we see it: a T-Rex that lets out a roar from the blackest depths of ancient time itself.

Maybe it’s the power trying to come back on, indeed.