Before Jurassic Park
DINOSAUR CAPSULE
Charles Pellegrino was a polymath. He was a writer, scientist, and futurist who spread his interests across different disciplines from paleontology and archeology to space science and religion. He helped design rockets and worked in part on the excavations of Pompeii and the Titanic. Over the years, he wrote more than a dozen books—fiction and nonfiction alike—and enjoyed close connections with other futurist writers from Isaac Asimov to Arthur C. Clarke. In other words, Pellegrino’s interests were wide-ranging, his ideas visionary. He was far from conventional, operating on the fringes of science but often at the center of controversy, especially when it came to his ideas of using multimillion-year-old DNA to bring dinosaurs back to life.
Born in New York in 1953, Pellegrino moved to New Zealand to study at Victoria University of Wellington. He claimed to have earned his doctorate in paleobiology in 1982, but the university denied he ever received the degree. Reportedly, Pellegrino and his committee had a falling-out over evolutionary theory, but his credentials were only questioned decades later when his book on World War II survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombing was pulled from publication on accusations of fraudulent source material.1 Bitter conflict at worst, and bad luck at best, have followed Pellegrino throughout his life in an unfortunate series of events, as his works were largely overlooked or openly contested.
One of Pellegrino’s most fascinating but neglected pieces of writing was a thought experiment turned article, published in 1985, on how to resurrect a dinosaur. Pellegrino believed that amber specimens—often whole organisms trapped in sticky tree resin then later encased and preserved in a hardened amber capsule—were the ultimate means to rediscover and recreate past life that had become extinct long before humans evolved on earth. He imagined a time when someone, somewhere, would discover the remains of insects pristinely preserved in amber that had once lived more than 65 million years ago, during the heyday of the dinosaurs. In this article, Pellegrino suggested that “ancient bacteria on and in the flies may still be capable of reproducing themselves,” and that in their “stomachs may be some undigested bits of their last meals, meals that came from animals, including dinosaurs that roamed the earth millions of years ago.” He further imagined the possibility of recovering genetic material from these amber fossils. The DNA would no doubt be damaged and degraded from the millennia, but he proposed using genetic material from living organisms today to fill in the gaps. He then suggested inserting this genetic information “into a cell nucleus” with “a yolk and an eggshell” in order to “hatch” a “dinosaur.” If such a specimen existed, scientists could “re-create prehistoric animals.”2 According to Pellegrino, dinosaur resurrection, in theory, could be possible.
Pellegrino claimed his ideas were inspired by two specific events from several years earlier. The first occurred in 1977 when Gerard Case, a local fossil hunter, introduced Pellegrino to a treasure trove of ancient amber from a site in New Jersey dating to the Cretaceous Period, the last and longest span of time in the Mesozoic Era. According to Pellegrino, two digs and two years later, they had recovered two 95-million-year-old flies preserved in amber. The second event took place shortly following his search for amber in the field, when Pellegrino, then at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and entomologist Paul Wygodzinski at the American Museum of Natural History in New York made an unusual observation in the lab. Under the microscope, they found “mummified” insects in amber whose “internal organs appeared to be preserved in microscopic detail” just “as if they have been alive the day before.” These two events together prompted Pellegrino to imagine the potential of amber for studying ancient and extinct organisms.3 Pellegrino speculated that if cellular structures could stand the test of time, then perhaps molecular components like DNA could too. If so, it could be a way of bringing dinosaurs back to life to “study them face to face.”4 Inspired by amber-embedded insects in the field and in the lab, Pellegrino actively advocated for these ideas about the theoretical preservation, potential extraction, and hypothetical resurrection of extinct life.
Pellegrino’s ideas, however, faced stiff criticism and resistance. In a later memoir, he remembered having open discussions about his theories with colleagues only to discover they thought them too speculative or “totally bizarre” and even “downright crazy.”5 Even as he experienced difficulty convincing his colleagues of his ideas in casual conversation, Pellegrino—unsurprisingly—encountered even more difficulty publishing them professionally. Based on a series of unpublished correspondence, it appears that Pellegrino had communicated with Smithsonian Magazine since 1981 about his amber article, but editors and reviewers alike thought the article was too speculative and therefore unpublishable. John Wiley, the magazine editor at the time, wrote a letter to Pellegrino explaining that even reasonable speculation would be difficult to defend because the magazine tended to be traditional and confronted enough challenges publishing mainstream articles.6
There were two reasons for this resistance to Pellegrino’s ideas. The first was theoretical. The general scientific consensus at the time was that organic components like soft tissue structures and molecules (amino acids, proteins, nucleic acids) did not preserve in the fossil record.7 Instead, when an organism died, scientists presumed that organic components decayed over time due to chemical and environmental processes. Internal processes such as autolysis contributed to the self-destruction of an organism’s cells soon after death. Taphonomic processes also played a role in an organism’s rate of degradation and potential for fossilization. For instance, external factors such as exposure to water and high or low temperatures could certainly contribute to the breakdown of cells and molecules. With these effects combined, often little was left of an organism except its skeleton. However, some studies as early as the 1950s began to challenge existing conceptions of cellular and molecular preservation.8 A number of studies, for example, actually found evidence that amino acids and proteins could survive millions of years after an organism had died. Important as these findings were, there was no evidence that nucleic acids (DNA) were capable of such long-term preservation. This presented a problem for Pellegrino’s hypothesis. Nonetheless, he was confident that amber could protect an organism from the standard chemical and environmental processes of degradation, thus preserving its DNA despite the test of time.
Second, Pellegrino’s ideas faced resistance for technical reasons. Even if DNA could be preserved in exceptional environments such as amber, the available technology for extracting and sequencing what would very likely be degraded DNA was inadequate for the job. In the early 1970s, less than a decade before Pellegrino started openly theorizing about his ideas, researchers developed some of the first molecular cloning methods that allowed the direct isolation, replication, and manipulation of DNA in ways not previously possible.9 A few years later, researchers invented the first molecular sequencing technique for determining the order, or sequence, of nucleotides (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) in DNA.10 This technique, called Sanger sequencing, was quickly adopted by researchers worldwide for its accuracy and efficiency, revolutionizing biomedical and biotechnological research along the way. Indeed, the Sanger sequencing was so influential that one of the researchers behind its invention, Frederick Sanger, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980 for its invention.11 Although revolutionary for the time, the technique was most appropriate as applied to modern material where much longer strands of DNA were readily available for cloning and sequencing. If any DNA were ever discovered to be preserved in fossils, it would likely be damaged and fragmented, which would render the cloning and sequencing of such short strands a challenge.
Pellegrino knew the search for and study of DNA from fossils depended on serious technical improvements, but he was confident that with advances, and a lot of luck, researchers would one day recover DNA from the stomachs of ancient insects and bring dinosaurs back to life. Thus, Pellegrino took preemptive steps, placing his prized 95-million-year-old amber insects away in a refrigerator where they would stay safely stored for twenty years or more while he waited for technological developments. Pellegrino certainly did not disregard the necessity of technology, but he also did not let its absence obstruct his vision for what might be possible in the future. For Pellegrino, this was a future “on the verge of redefining the word extinct.”12
Finding difficulty convincing colleagues and publishing professionally, Pellegrino took his recipe for resurrection in a different direction. Eventually, Omni—a popular science-fiction magazine—accepted his article on how to bring a dinosaur back to life. And in 1985, “Dinosaur Capsule” was finally published.
Pellegrino was not the only one thinking about recovering DNA from fossils. In the summer of 1980, John Tkach—a dermatologist in Bozeman, Montana—was riding his bicycle to work, apparently pondering the extinction of the dinosaurs.13 Tkach had always been interested in immunology, and he was fascinated by dinosaurs. He, along with other scientists of course, wondered why dinosaurs, apart from the line leading to living birds today, went extinct nearly 65 million years ago. It was a perennial question in the field of paleontology, and while new hypotheses about dinosaur evolution and extinction had begun to circulate a decade before, Tkach found them unsatisfying.
Riding his bicycle to work that summer, Tkach had a thought, an answer to the mystery of dinosaurian extinction. According to a private memoir by Tkach, he hypothesized that dinosaurs likely lacked a “bursa of Fabricius”—a vital organ in immune systems of modern birds. Tkach speculated that dinosaurs, lacking this organ, “could not cope with infections,” and that “new pathogens must have come along that they could not defend against,” so “over millions of years” they must have “died out.”14 In formulating this idea, Tkach was also aligning part of his hypothesis with an already hotly contested topic at the time, namely that extant, or living, birds today are the direct descendants of extinct dinosaurs. Tkach’s idea was controversial to begin with but even more so because it lacked evidence. He would need DNA, specifically dinosaur DNA, as evidence.
That autumn, Tkach had an idea. He imagined a scenario in which “a mosquito had fed on a dinosaur,” leaving behind “a dinosaur white blood cell with a diploid set of chromosomes in its stomach.” If that “insect had been preserved in amber,” he thought, “it might be possible to recover the chromosomes from that white blood cell, put them into an enucleated amphibian egg, and grow a dinosaur.” Tkach thought it “unlikely, but theoretically possible.”15 He shared this speculation with several scientists, hoping to enlist their efforts in the search for DNA from ancient amber. In the process, he encountered a mix of pessimism and optimism. Despite mixed reviews, Tkach submitted his ideas to Developmental and Comparative Immunology, but his manuscript was rejected on account that his hypothesis had no evidence to support it.16 Tkach felt his ideas had reached an impasse.
In 1980, the same year Tkach started speculating about dinosaur extinction and resurrection, George Poinar, an entomologist, and Roberta Hess (later Roberta Poinar), an electron microscopist, at the University of California, Berkeley, went to work for what they thought would be another average day in the lab. According to their memoir, this day turned out to be different. Under the microscope, they were shocked to see the insides of a 40-million-year-old insect preserved in amber: “When we looked up at each other, the same thought was written across our faces—surely this fly’s cell structure must be intact too!” Together, they began to investigate what they believed was a unique discovery. They first photographed the fossil for documentation, then sliced it in two. Next, they undertook the tedious process of sectioning the insect inside the amber for a more detailed examination. After weeks of work and trial and error, the results were ready. Poinar and Hess found exceptional evidence for the organic preservation of a 40-million-year-old fly in Baltic amber, complete with “nuclei and organelle” and “entire muscle bands with easily identifiable components such as fibrils and mitochondria.” They even saw evidence for the “tracheoles, the breathing apparatus of insects.”17
As far as Poinar and Hess were concerned, this was a rare case of mummification from the prehistoric past. Although they did not find evidence for DNA, they did privately speculate about its likelihood. “If tissues could be discovered so well preserved in amber-embedded insects 40 million years old,” they wrote in their memoir, “what else could be found?” “What about nucleic acids?”18 If DNA preservation were remotely possible, they believed it would be so through the preservative properties of amber resin.
In 1982, Science—one of the oldest, most widely read, and most prestigious academic research journals—published Poinar and Hess’s research results as the first evidence that soft tissue structures could remain nearly perfectly intact millions of years after an organism’s death.19 Tkach encountered this paper shortly after his own article was rejected, reviving his interest in dinosaur resurrection, particularly from DNA found in amber-preserved insects. In his private memoir, Tkach recalled Poinar and Hess’s publication as “pivotal” because it suggested that his own ideas were not so far-fetched but in fact quite “practical.”20 In fact, “it was damned exciting.”21 For Tkach, Poinar and Hess’s article on cellular preservation in ancient amber, and principally its publication in a highly esteemed journal such as Science, was the empirical evidence he needed. Tkach wrote Poinar in December 1982, and in January of the next year he received a reply. Poinar suggested they form a study group.
In 1983, Tkach, Poinar, Hess, and fellow colleagues formed the Extinct DNA Study Group. By February of that year, Tkach had written and distributed the first “Extinct DNA Newsletter” to a handful of scientists across the country. In the introduction, he stated the new group’s principal objective: to investigate the recovery of genes from extinct organisms and their transcription and translation via recombinant DNA technology. The group was also concerned with studying the evolution of proteins as well as the role of parasites, pathogens, and bacteria in the extinction of species. The Extinct DNA Study Group was likewise interested in “culturing tissues from extinct life forms” and “cloning extinct life forms by the recovery of haploid or diploid sets of chromosomes.” Overall, Tkach described the Extinct DNA Study Group as a group of “mature scientists” with “extensive educations” and “a hardcore molecular biology outlook.”22 According to the group, the answers to some of the most interesting questions in paleontology and evolutionary biology would be found using molecular biological techniques and technologies.
Following the first newsletter came the first meeting of the group, which Tkach held at his home in Montana in March 1983, and they discussed issues of authenticity and contamination. If they wanted to convince doubtful colleagues of the long-term preservation of DNA in ancient and extinct organisms, they would need to demonstrate that DNA or other molecular information extracted from fossil material was ancient and authentic to the organism of interest and not contamination from other organisms or the external environment. They also discussed the importance of terminology, from “paleobiology” to “paleogenes” and “paleogenomes,” as they entered what they felt was unfamiliar territory.23
During this first meeting, Tkach shared his hypothesis about using DNA preserved in the stomach of an insect preserved in amber to resurrect dinosaurs. He also outlined the idea in writing, as well as its reception by Extinct DNA Study Group members, in the second newsletter.24 Reportedly, the group was intrigued but really doubted DNA could remain sufficiently intact to be viable.25 From somewhat isolated speculation to more collegial collaboration, the Extinct DNA Study Group became the first official forum through which researchers entertained ideas regarding the preservation and extraction of DNA in fossils and resurrection of extinct species.
The group knew their unconventional ideas would generate criticism. Sure enough, they encountered this when recruiting researchers to join. In a later memoir written by Poinar and Hess, they recalled that “few were willing to jeopardize their careers or suffer the derision of colleagues.” As far as they were concerned, “the actual membership was limited to a courageous handful.”26 But even the “courageous” were cautious. In his own account, Tkach recalled that “all members of the group feared for their reputations” because “they were concerned that premature release of information without adequate proof of authenticity” would “damage their reputations.” “We agreed to be careful about our claims,” he recounted, “until we felt we had done as much as we could to prove authenticity.”27 According to the first newsletter, Tkach expressed this concern, writing, “Dr. Poinar has asked that we not discuss this work with the press” for the reason that “adverse publicity could have a crushing effect on his work.”28 From their view as practicing researchers, speculation was a creative and healthy part of the scientific process. However, too much speculation with too little evidence, coupled with premature exposure, could damage the research and reputations of those involved. Timing and evidence were everything.
Poinar and Hess had at first assumed they were alone in the search for cells and molecules in multimillion-year-old amber insects. So did Tkach. Their intellectual isolation, however, was short lived. “It’s amazing when you consider it,” claimed Poinar and Hess, “how people can arrive at the same idea (extracting DNA from amber insects) from different perspectives.”29 Tkach’s interest in dinosaur extinction and Poinar and Hess’s entomological investigations in the lab brought them to an identical conjecture about how to travel back in time to learn more about the prehistoric past, and even bring dinosaurs back to life.
JURASSIC PARK
Around this same time in the early 1980s, Michael Crichton—a doctor turned novelist—was writing a screenplay about a genetically engineered dinosaur. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Crichton had foregone practicing medicine in exchange for a career writing science fiction. Over the course of a decade, he had earned a name for himself as a world-renowned author whose best-selling novels The Andromeda Strain and Westworld were made into highly successful movies. Crichton wanted to write another science-fiction thriller, this time about dinosaurs, but he feared the book would appear too trendy given what he referred to as an “enormous mania about dinosaurs.”30
Sure enough, the previous decade had witnessed a growing professional and popular interest in dinosaurs. This “Dinosaur Renaissance” was stimulated by an influx of research that questioned traditional views of dinosaur anatomy, physiology, evolution, and extinction.31 Some paleontologists, for example, argued that although most dinosaurs went extinct, one specific lineage had survived and evolved into the feathered, flight-capable birds of today.32 Others argued that dinosaurs had been hot-blooded creatures, not cold-blooded reptiles as previously presumed and as often depicted in media.33 Additionally, new fossil evidence of dinosaur skeletons with associated nests and eggs led scientists to suggest that these ancient animals likely cared for their young.34 Perhaps most revolutionary, however, was a new hypothesis that proposed a massive asteroid impact on earth as the chief cause for the extinction of nearly 80 percent of life on the planet, including dinosaurs, approximately 65 million years ago.35
The public had long been captivated by prehistoric life, dinosaurs in particular, thanks to early scientists’ efforts to popularize the young field of paleontology in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth. The “Dinosaur Renaissance” of the 1970s was very much a continuation of this obsession with prehistory.36 Crichton realized this, along with the fact that the dinosaur mania was not fleeting. As far as he was concerned, this “fascination with dinosaurs was permanent,” and he decided to capitalize on it.37
As Crichton was writing his story, Poinar and Hess were publishing their research on the long-term cellular preservation of insects in amber. In a later account of the event, Poinar told a media reporter and blogger that Crichton visited him at Berkeley back in 1983. According to Poinar, Crichton took notes while he discussed the details of his work. As far as Poinar could remember, Crichton never mentioned anything concerning writing a book about genetically engineered dinosaurs.38 After this meeting, Poinar and Hess went on with their efforts, particularly their collaboration with the Extinct DNA Study Group, not thinking of Crichton until years later.39
Based on Poinar and Hess’s report of events, the next time Crichton crossed their minds was when they received a phone call from Universal Pictures informing them that they, as well as the Extinct DNA Study Group, were acknowledged in the back of a new book titled Jurassic Park.40 Initially published in November 1990, the science-fiction thriller was about genetically engineered dinosaurs that scientists had resurrected via DNA preserved in and extracted from a long-dead mosquito entombed in amber. These fictional scientists intended the dinosaurs to be part of a world-class theme park, called Jurassic Park. However, it quickly turned into a scientific experiment gone madly wrong. In the book, Crichton very intentionally tapped into the promise and fears of genetic engineering, appealing to professional and public audiences alike.41 Jurassic Park was an immediate best-seller and a multimillion-dollar movie in the making by Universal, directed by Steven Spielberg, the critically and commercially acclaimed director of the Hollywood blockbusters Jaws and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.42 At the end of the book, Crichton acknowledged the ideas and individuals that inspired it. Just as the caller had said, Poinar, Hess, and the Extinct DNA Study Group were clear contributors.
Although Poinar and Hess’s research was acknowledged, Pellegrino’s ideas as recorded in “Dinosaur Capsule” and published by Omni in 1985 were never mentioned, at least not at first.43 In one version of the book’s acknowledgments printed in 1991, Crichton noted that “certain ideas” about “paleo-DNA” were “first articulated by George O. Poinar, Jr., and Roberta Hess, who formed the Extinct DNA Study Group at Berkeley.”44 In another paperback version published the same year, the acknowledgments read slightly differently. Here, Crichton noted that “certain ideas” were “first articulated by Charles Pellegrino” but “based on the research by George O. Poinar, Jr., and Roberta Hess, who formed the Extinct DNA Study Group at Berkeley.”45
To this day, it is unclear as to what role Pellegrino’s “Dinosaur Capsule” played, or did not play, as inspiration for Crichton’s Jurassic Park. What is clear, however, is that Pellegrino felt cheated, not necessarily by Crichton but certainly by Poinar. Recall that Pellegrino had corresponded with Smithsonian Magazine nearly a decade before Jurassic Park was published about his hypothesis to resurrect dinosaurs from DNA preserved in amber insects. A letter from John Wiley, the magazine editor, to Pellegrino had explained that reviewers thought his article was too speculative. The letter also revealed that Poinar had been one of those reviewers and an obstacle in its path toward publication. According to Wiley’s letter, Poinar seemed to want to write and take credit for the idea himself.46
At the time, Pellegrino knew Poinar was aware of his work and for whatever reason was opposed to its publication. However, it was only after Jurassic Park was released and the acknowledgments as well as media reporters began to credit Poinar as the inspiration behind the book that Pellegrino became openly upset about the situation. Indeed, Poinar now seemed to be taking credit for the idea he had once rejected. An article in the New York Times, for example, clearly attributed the “recipe” to Poinar. “Obviously, we couldn’t reconstruct an extinct animal today, even if we had all its DNA,” said Poinar in an interview with the Times. “However, my belief is that there are dinosaur cells inside biting flies trapped in amber of Cretaceous age and older. It’s just a matter of finding the dinosaur DNA and getting it out.”47 In response, Pellegrino wrote the newspaper asking that they set the record straight. “There is an old rule in science, about the reception of a new idea,” he observed, referencing one of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous sayings. “At first it is dismissed as being wrong, then the one who conceived it is characterized as being a heretic, a lunatic, or both; and finally, it is said to be something everybody knew all along.”48 From Pellegrino’s view, Poinar took this a step further, and a step too far, so much so that Pellegrino threatened Poinar with legal action for misappropriation of his work, namely his idea that scientists might one day discover dinosaur DNA from amber-preserved insects and bring them back to life.49
UNLIKELY BEGINNINGS
Starting in the late 1970s and continuing throughout the 1980s, a number of characters from futurists and enthusiasts to scientists and science-fiction writers contributed to the early intellectual history of the search for DNA from fossils. At this time, three ideas—the theoretical preservation and potential extraction of DNA from fossils and the hypothetical resurrection of extinct organisms from DNA in ancient material—inspired a new way of thinking about fossils. These ideas appeared to have arisen independently among different individuals from four distinct perspectives. Pellegrino, for example, was a scientist and futurist who approached these ideas as a visionary, so much so that scientific colleagues were hesitant or sometimes downright dismissive of his resurrection hypothesis. Tkach, a science enthusiast, was similarly speculative but ultimately successful in enlisting experts to investigate his hypothesis, while Poinar and Hess appeared to have arrived at these ideas through more conventional means in the lab and publication of research results in the high-profile journal Science. Crichton’s fictional work in progress was also a part of this early history. These story lines suggest that scientific innovation can originate from ideas and individuals outside the traditional confines of the research laboratory.
One way to understand the emergence of these unique but not unrelated events is to view “Ancient DNA” as a “boundary object.” This concept of a boundary object was proposed by science studies scholars Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer as a framework for understanding how information or material can be used in various ways by various people. As they argued, a boundary object is flexible enough to be interpreted differently across groups but stable enough to maintain a recognizable identity across these same groups. For example, in examining the founding of the Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in the early 1900s, Star and Griesemer argued that maps, field notes, and even specimens functioned as boundary objects as multiple people from museum curators and scientists to amateur collectors and trappers viewed these objects differently and used them to different ends.50 Ancient DNA was a kind of boundary object but not, at least at this time, in a material or tangible sense. Rather, it was a boundary object that existed as an idea. It was the idea of isolating, extracting, and sequencing DNA from fossils and using it to study evolutionary history (or possibly using it to bring back extinct creatures such as dinosaurs) that disparate people, arguably from disparate social worlds, had in common. The potential to discover ancient DNA functioned as an organizing principle, bringing different people together to investigate its reality, albeit to varying ends.
These individuals were instrumental in setting expectations in terms of what they imagined researchers could be capable of achieving with this new line of research. Early expectations regarding the recovery of DNA from fossils and its potential uses within evolutionary biology were not isolated imaginings of a single person or group. In other words, various individuals—other than the actual scientists directly involved in the research—often have their own visions for scientific and technological innovation, as well as their own opinions regarding the application of those innovations. Equally important is understanding the role that these expectations, however grounded or fantastical, may play in the early days of innovation, particularly the ways in which expectations can generate activity around new ideas.51 For Tkach, the recovery of dinosaur DNA from amber insects could be used to test his hypothesis of dinosaurian evolution and extinction, ultimately leading to a connection with Poinar and formation of the Extinct DNA Study Group. For Crichton, it was a fantastical but plausible idea that informed the premise for his novel.
From its inception, the idea of extracting DNA from ancient and extinct organisms was closely connected to the idea of bringing dinosaurs back to life, playing out in the work and writings of various individuals—scientists and visionaries alike—well before the book and movie Jurassic Park made its premiere. More than that, this connection would prove foundational to the birth and rise of a new scientific field.