Jurassic Park Bioethics

The Bioethics of Genetic Engineering and Jurassic Park

In Jurassic park, things ended pretty badly. Dinosaurs were going crazy and destroying the park. There were precautions taken by the people running the park to prevent this of course, but they failed. They made all the dinosaurs female so the dinosaurs couldn’t breed by themselves. They deleted the amino acid lysine so the dinosaurs couldn’t survive on their own outside of the park. And lastly, they had security in the park. Unfortunately, all of these precautions failed.

The scientists found the dinosaur DNA in blood in mosquitoes who were fossilized in amber. There were pieces missing in the dinosaur sequence, so the scientists used a frogs DNA to fill in the gaps. They were then able to produce a dinosaur and alter their chromosomes. The scientists made all the dinosaurs female so the dinosaurs couldn’t breed on their own. What the scientists didn’t think through was that certain frogs can change their sex if the opposite sex is absent in the environment. When the scientists gave the frog DNA to dinosaurs, they also gave the dinosaurs the ability to change sex as well. Now there were female and male dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs were able to produce on their own. Like Dr. Malcolm said, “Life

finds a way.”

When creating the dinosaurs, the scientists disallowed the dinosaurs to be able to produce the amino acid lysine, which is crucial to life.

To make the dinosaurs dependent on the humans, the workers would give the dinosaurs lysine in their food. The dinosaurs could only survive in the park with the lysine filled food. If they happened to escape the park, the dinosaurs wouldn’t survive long without the lysine. This was called the lysine contingency. The scientists didn’t realize that when the dinosaurs were breeding on their own, with their lysine from the food in them, they were creating offspring with lysine already in them. The new offspring wasn’t dependent on the humans and could survive outside the

park.

The last precaution was the security. The park was on an island to keep it secret from the public and to protect the public. They also had an electric fence around the whole compound and security watching the dinosaurs and the whole park. The security fails badly. First the security is unable to notice that the dinosaurs are breeding on their own. The electric fences can't protect Dr. Grant and the kids in the car scene where they are forced into the actual park with the dinosaurs. Many dinosaurs escape to the visitors center too, putting everyone in danger. The remaining crew only survives on their own wits and strength, not the security.