Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (27 page)

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 This is not to say that stories portraying them as dangerous will not one day be discovered; they have simply not been found yet.

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 There is a lot of debate over how old the Golem story really is and whether the 1909 text that was “found” actually had been written by the rabbi’s son-in-law. Some argue that the “finder” of this work, Yudl Rosenberg, wrote the text himself to fantasize about fighting the increasing violence that Jews were facing during the early 1900s.

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 Fascinating work conducted by the biomedical engineer Maryam Tabrizian at McGill University in Montreal and recently published in the journal
Biomacromolecules
shows that we are now able to effectively make red blood cells invisible. By coating the cells in thin polymer layers that still allow them to do their duties, Tabrizian and her team showed that it is possible to grant red blood cells of one blood type the ability to function inside a body that is used to red blood cells of another type. While currently being tested only in mice, initial results suggest that the technology works and that a day may soon come when worrying about having the right blood type for a patient becomes a thing of the past.

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 By people, I mean men.

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 Very important always to have a measuring tape and calculator on hand during first dates for such things.

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 An intriguing aspect of this film is that Dren undergoes a sex change. While female for much of the story, she is most violent after transforming into a male and ceases to be a character we sympathize with. Pages could be written on the gender psychology being invoked, but I’m not going to get into that. I’ll just point out that the biology here is all wrong. Although there are many animals that change gender during their lives, they do not usually switch from female to male; they switch from male to female. This all has to do with logistics. Being a male is cheap and easy. You just release sperm and let the female do the heavy lifting. Thus, if you are going to be a male and a female during one life, you want to be male first (when you are small and weak) and female second (when you are bigger, tougher, and have more resources at your disposal to produce offspring). But the
Splice
story wouldn’t have worked if the gender swap had been done the other way around, and I guess Natali figured that most audiences weren’t geeky enough to catch him getting the biology wrong.

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 Contrary to popular belief, the bears that are actually the most dangerous are those that lose their fear of people by being fed by them. These animals come to see humans as a free meal ticket and become aggressive when they are not given the food they want and expect. Bears that get shot at do everything they can to stay away from people. Sure, we still read about tourists being ripped apart after trying to nuzzle a bear cub or photograph a grizzly at close range, but seriously, are these cases of the bear being dangerous or the human being stupid?

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 Fear of the federal government. Totally irrational, right?

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Terror Resurrected—Dinosaurs

“The lack of humility before nature that’s being displayed here, uh… staggers me.”

—Dr. Ian Malcolm,
Jurassic Park

While lions and bears were truly terrible threats to early humans, fossils show all too clearly that these predators were nothing compared to the animals that came before them. Yes, the media have relentlessly discussed dinosaurs in recent decades, but there is still a real lack of appreciation in society for how big and dangerous they actually were. The long-necked species
Diplodocus
is a good example. It topped out at around a 30 feet (10 meters) long and 20 feet (6 meters) tall, larger than many buildings. Carnivores were smaller.
Tyrannosaurus rex,
by no means the largest of the meat-eating dinosaurs, was only a bit taller and 50 percent longer than the largest giraffes. Of course, a statement like that is preposterous. A bit taller and 50 percent longer than a giraffe is still huge. Giraffes are big animals. Being right next to them is nerve-racking. One false step and they can easily break a human foot or, worse, snap a spine.

Based on size alone, the average
Tyrannosaurus rex
was much
more of a threat than the long-necked plant-eater known so well today. Yet add to it the fact that its mouth was loaded with pointed teeth the size of bananas, and the results are mind-boggling.

It is difficult to know for certain just how strong the bite of a
Tyrannosaurus
was, but comparisons with modern animals can give scientists a rough idea. Numerous bear and great cat species have jaws strong enough to crush a human head like a grape. With this in mind,
T. rex
would have been able to deal out a whole lot more damage had humans been around when it was alive.
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Aside from being fun for paleontologists, trying to work out how an ancient predator like
Tyrannosaurus rex
functioned is a great exercise for realizing just how small modern predators actually are. Perhaps more important, it is also an opportunity to recognize why dinosaurs have featured so prominently as monsters in stories since their identification by the scientist Sir Richard Owen in 1841. Even in the Victorian era, when Sir Richard was doing his work, he must have felt that they were frightening animals, because he chose to formally call them “
deinos,
” meaning “fearfully great,” and “
sauros,
” meaning “lizard.”

Dinosaurs have not changed since their discovery more than a century ago. Their bones are still just as big and their teeth just as sharp. Yet they have risen and fallen through the decades as monsters. There have been periods of intense interest along with some lulls. Why?

A lot of this likely has to do with believability. The waxing and waning of dinosaur popularity seem to follow trends that question whether they might “still be out there” or potentially be “resurrected.”
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Early books and films that featured dinosaurs as monsters always
latched on to the idea of a “lost world” where dinosaurs had somehow evaded extinction. During the years when Arthur Conan Doyle wrote
The Lost World
and Jules Verne penned
Journey to the Center of the Earth,
there were still vast swaths of uncharted jungle on the planet. The idea of a land where great beasts still reigned supreme seemed both plausible and exhilarating. These mysterious and unexplored landscapes were perfect for early science-fiction writers to make use of because even the top scientists of the age admitted they had no idea what they expected to find there.

Yet the “lost world” genre of dinosaur monster stories lost its edge as Earth got better explored and it became obvious that the only species going unnoticed were the insects beneath the feet of native tribespeople.

Michael Crichton’s
Jurassic Park
dramatically changed the dinosaur monster genre by moving away from the historic “lost world” concept. Instead, Crichton, being well trained in the sciences, accepted dinosaurs as extinct and suggested that mankind had the ability to bring them back through modern genetics. Not only was this a new idea that the general public had not yet pondered, it also was one that researchers had not much considered either.

The murky details of the science and theory behind
Jurassic Park
literally “resurrected” the beasts as monsters for a new generation. There were so many new unknowns in Crichton’s story that imaginations ran wild with the possibility of a terrible fiasco, like that seen in the theme park featured in the book, actually happening. Questions ran so deep that, in the wake of the book and film, people began to ponder the possibility that what
Jurassic Park
suggested with regard to dinosaur resurrection was actually possible.

All it would take was DNA stored in a drop of blood. In
Jurassic Park,
the premise is that mosquitoes collected blood from dinosaurs during the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, and some of these
insects then became stuck in tree resin. Tree resin becomes hard over time and transforms into amber, which, according to the book, protects the insect and the dinosaur blood in its belly from decay and destruction.

Jurassic Park
researchers drill into amber samples and draw out dinosaur blood from the encased insect to put together dinosaur DNA. The concept captivated imaginations because, at the time, the science seemed feasible.

The Natural History Museum in London, having no shortage of dinosaur bones, a large collection of fossilized insects in amber, and a team of capable paleontologists, became a focal point for inquiries from both the research community and patrons smitten with the concept of bringing back the dead. A team was assembled to start looking for dinosaur blood inside fossilized insects and, if found, to determine whether any genetic information on dinosaurs could be collected from it.

Upon setting out on this exploration, there was a great deal of optimism. DNA falls apart over time. Any exposure to bacteria, dramatic changes in temperature, or shifts in pressure can cause the tiny sequences of proteins making up DNA to decay, leaving the genetic code in useless tatters. Yet the idea that an amber shell might afford protection presented an exciting possibility for preservation.

The process of tree resin hardening into amber causes objects stuck in the sap to dehydrate. This is significant because water removal is well known to shield organic materials from decay. This is one reason why properly prepared Egyptian mummies buried in the desiccating sands of North Africa are still in such great condition after more than three thousand years. It was this desiccating property of amber that researchers were counting on to help DNA survive the sixty-to-eighty-million-year time capsule journey from the age of the dinosaurs to the modern world.

To add to the enthusiasm, in 1992, just two years after
Jurassic Park
was written, a laboratory in California reported extracting insect DNA from an ancient bee that had been encased in amber millions of years ago. Shortly thereafter, reports started cropping up describing
the recovery of amber-preserved termite and beetle DNA as well. With so many cases of insect DNA being recovered, hopes were further raised that dinosaur DNA from insect blood meals would soon follow.

To start their work, the Natural History Museum team tried to repeat the Californian insect DNA capture research. They attempted to collect insect DNA from the same extinct bees stuck in amber that the Californians had worked with but were unable to do it. Using multiple extraction methods and repeating these with several different specimens got the team nowhere. And this process was intended to be just the first step. Really old, and therefore highly valuable, amber samples from the days of the dinosaurs were to be drilled into and sampled only if insects in younger amber yielded helpful data. With no useful information coming from the process, nobody could justify continuing the research and the project ended.

In theory, the failure to resurrect dinosaurs using the methods presented in
Jurassic Park
should once again have made dinosaurs less viable as monsters in modern media. Yet with the release of numerous film sequels, dinosaurs maintained their monster status. A reason for this probably lies in the fact that
Jurassic Park
used a multilayered approach to make its monsters believable. The resurrection technique was the most obvious, but there were actually two more.

Chaos theory isn’t a big factor in the film, but the book develops the idea in great detail. Ian Malcolm, the mathematician in the story, relentlessly argues that biological systems, like those on display in the park, have tiny variables present in them that make their future behavior impossible to predict and, ultimately, impractical to control.

This talk of the natural world being unpredictable generates a perspective of nature that resonates with many real fears in society today. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis wreak untold havoc and are extremely hard to predict. By their very nature
they are chaotic and terrifying. Earthquake and tsunami detection research is advancing swiftly and, in the decades ahead, warnings of these disasters will become more common and precise. The same is true of extreme weather. Radar detection methods for predicting these dangerous events are improving, but it is still hard to work out exactly how hurricanes and tornadoes are going to behave.

Events like tornadoes and tsunamis, however, are not biological systems, and Malcolm’s argument about chaos theory and the dinosaurs in
Jurassic Park
is that biological systems are uncontrollable by nature and therefore inherently threatening. Specifically, he says, “If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands to new territories, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously.”

The chaos theory discussions are then combined with an image of dinosaurs not as extinct beasts with no real place on our planet but as living, breathing animals with a great many natural behaviors.

The attention to ecological detail runs throughout both the book and the film. The most striking example is the moment when Dennis Nedry, the corrupt computer programmer who purposely shuts down the electric fences in the park to smuggle out stolen dinosaur embryos, gets attacked.

Nedry is killed by a dinosaur, yet the mechanism for the attack is remarkably similar to the attack behaviors seen in modern predators. In both the film and the novel, the dinosaur, which is described as belonging to the genus
Dilophosaurus,
chirps like a bird while spitting venom from a distance to blind its prey before closing in for the kill.

There are no animals that actually spit venom, but there are a number of cobras that spray venom out of their fangs. While these real “spitting” snakes can (and do) blind other animals with their venom, they do not spray their venom for hunting; they do it as a defensive measure when threatened by larger animals. And just like the venom shown in the film, the venom sprayed by cobras does cause searing pain and blindness if it strikes animals (or people) in the eyes.