Jurassic Park: A Novel (15 page)

Tim went with the others, following Mr. Regis up the black suspended staircase to the second floor of the building. They passed a sign that read:

CLOSED AREA
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
BEYOND THIS POINT

Tim felt a thrill when he saw that sign. They walked down the second-floor hallway. One wall was glass, looking out onto a balcony with palm trees in the light mist. On the other wall were stenciled doors, like offices:
PARK WARDEN
 … 
GUEST SERVICES
 … 
GENERAL MANAGER
.…

Halfway down the corridor they came to a glass partition marked with another sign:

Underneath were more signs:

CAUTION
TERATOGENIC SUBSTANCES
PREGNANT WOMEN AVOID EXPOSURE
TO THIS AREA

DANGER
RADIOACTIVE ISOTOPES IN USE
CARCINOGENIC POTENTIAL

Tim grew more excited all the time. Teratogenic substances! Things that made monsters! It gave him a thrill, and he was disappointed
to hear Ed Regis say, “Never mind the signs, they’re just up for legal reasons. I can assure you everything is perfectly safe.” He led them through the door. There was a guard on the other side. Ed Regis turned to the group.

“You may have noticed that we have a minimum of personnel on the island. We can run this resort with a total of twenty people. Of course, we’ll have more when we have guests here, but at the moment there’s only twenty. Here’s our control room. The entire park is controlled from here.”

They paused before windows and peered into a darkened room that looked like a small version of Mission Control. There was a vertical glass see-through map of the park, and facing it a bank of glowing computer consoles. Some of the screens displayed data, but most of them showed video images from around the park. There were just two people inside, standing and talking.

“The man on the left is our chief engineer, John Arnold”—Regis pointed to a thin man in a button-down short-sleeve shirt and tie, smoking a cigarette—“and next to him, our park warden, Mr. Robert Muldoon, the famous white hunter from Nairobi.” Muldoon was a burly man in khaki, sunglasses dangling from his shirt pocket. He glanced out at the group, gave a brief nod, and turned back to the computer screens. “I’m sure you want to see this room,” Ed Regis said, “but first, let’s see how we obtain dinosaur DNA.”

The sign on the door said
EXTRACTIONS
and, like all the doors in the laboratory building, it opened with a security card. Ed Regis slipped the card in the slot; the light blinked; and the door opened.

Inside, Tim saw a small room bathed in green light. Four technicians in lab coats were peering into double-barreled stereo microscopes, or looking at images on high resolution video screens. The room was filled with yellow stones. The stones were in glass shelves; in cardboard boxes; in large pull-out trays. Each stone was tagged and numbered in black ink.

Regis introduced Henry Wu, a slender man in his thirties. “Dr. Wu is our chief geneticist. I’ll let him explain what we do here.”

Henry Wu smiled. “At least I’ll try,” he said. “Genetics is a bit complicated. But you’re probably wondering where our dinosaur DNA comes from.”

“It crossed my mind,” Grant said.

“As a matter of fact,” Wu said, “there are two possible sources.
Using the Loy antibody extraction technique, we can sometimes get DNA directly from dinosaur bones.”

“What kind of a yield?” Grant asked.

“Well, most soluble protein is leached out during fossilization, but twenty percent of the proteins are still recoverable by grinding up the bones and using Loy’s procedure. Dr. Loy himself has used it to obtain proteins from extinct Australian marsupials, as well as blood cells from ancient human remains. His technique is so refined it can work with a mere fifty nanograms of material. That’s fifty-billionths of a gram.”

“And you’ve adapted his technique here?” Grant asked.

“Only as a backup,” Wu said. “As you can imagine, a twenty percent yield is insufficient for our work. We need the entire dinosaur DNA strand in order to clone. And we get it here.” He held up one of the yellow stones. “From amber—the fossilized resin of prehistoric tree sap.”

Grant looked at Ellie, then at Malcolm.

“That’s really quite clever,” Malcolm said, nodding.

“I still don’t understand,” Grant admitted.

“Tree sap,” Wu explained, “often flows over insects and traps them. The insects are then perfectly preserved within the fossil. One finds all kinds of insects in amber—including biting insects that have sucked blood from larger animals.”

“Sucked the blood,” Grant repeated. His mouth fell open. “You mean sucked the blood of dinosaurs …”

“Hopefully, yes.”

“And then the insects are preserved in amber.…” Grant shook his head. “l’ll be damned—that just might work.”

“I assure you, it
does
work,” Wu said. He moved to one of the microscopes, where a technician positioned a piece of amber containing a fly under the microscope. On the video monitor, they watched as he inserted a long needle through the amber, into the thorax of the prehistoric fly.

“If this insect has any foreign blood cells, we may be able to extract them, and obtain paleo-DNA, the DNA of an extinct creature. We won’t know for sure, of course, until we extract whatever is in there, replicate it, and test it. That is what we have been doing for five years now. It has been a long, slow process—but it has paid off.

“Actually, dinosaur DNA is somewhat easier to extract by this
process than mammalian DNA. The reason is that mammalian red cells have no nuclei, and thus no DNA in their red cells. To clone a mammal, you must find a white cell, which is much rarer than red cells. But dinosaurs had nucleated red cells, as do modern birds. It is one of the many indications we have that dinosaurs aren’t really reptiles at all. They are big leathery birds.”

Tim saw that Dr. Grant still looked skeptical, and Dennis Nedry, the messy fat man, appeared completely uninterested, as if he knew it all already. Nedry kept looking impatiently toward the next room.

“I see Mr. Nedry has spotted the next phase of our work,” Wu said. “How we identify the DNA we have extracted. For that, we use powerful computers.”

They went through sliding doors into a chilled room. There was a loud humming sound. Two six-foot-tall round towers stood in the center of the room, and along the walls were rows of waist-high stainless-steel boxes. “This is our high-tech laundromat,” Dr. Wu said. “The boxes along the walls are all Hamachi-Hood automated gene sequencers. They are being run, at very high speed, by the Cray XMP supercomputers, which are the towers in the center of the room. In essence, you are standing in the middle of an incredibly powerful genetics factory.”

There were several monitors, all running so fast it was hard to see what they were showing. Wu pushed a button and slowed one image.

“Here you see the actual structure of a small fragment of dinosaur DNA,” Wu said. “Notice the sequence is made up of four basic compounds—adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. This amount of DNA probably contains instructions to make a single protein—say, a hormone or an enzyme. The full DNA molecule contains
three billion
of these bases. If we looked at a screen like this once a second, for eight hours a day, it’d still take more than two years to look at the entire DNA strand. It’s that big.”

He pointed to the image. “This is a typical example, because you see the DNA has an error, down here in line 1201. Much of the DNA we extract is fragmented or incomplete. So the first thing we have to do is repair it—or rather, the computer has to. It’ll cut the DNA, using what are called restriction enzymes. The computer will select a variety of enzymes that might do the job.”

“Here is the same section of DNA, with the points of the restriction enzymes located. As you can see in line 1201, two enzymes will cut on either side of the damaged point. Ordinarily we let the computers decide which to use. But we also need to know what base pairs we should insert to repair the injury. For that, we have to align various cut fragments, like so.”

“Now we are finding a fragment of DNA that overlaps the injury area, and will tell us what is missing. And you can see we can find it, and go ahead and make the repair. The dark bars you see are restriction fragments—small sections of dinosaur DNA, broken by enzymes and then analyzed. The computer is now recombining them, by searching for overlapping sections of code. It’s a little bit like putting a puzzle together. The computer can do it very rapidly.”

“And here is the revised DNA strand, repaired by the computer.
The operation you’ve witnessed would have taken months in a conventional lab, but we can do it in seconds.”

“Then are you working with the entire DNA strand?” Grant asked.

“Oh no,” Wu said. “That’s impossible. We’ve come a long way from the sixties, when it took a whole laboratory four
years
to decode a screen like this. Now the computers can do it in a couple of hours. But, even so, the DNA molecule is too big. We look only at the sections of the strand that differ from animal to animal, or from contemporary DNA. Only a few percent of the nucleotides differ from one species to the next. That’s what we analyze, and it’s still a big job.”