Ricki Lewis

Multiple spoiler alert! 

 

In the classic film Jurassic Park (JP), disasters unfurl at a theme park populated with dinosaurs cloned from reptile DNA in mosquitoes fossilized in amber, with modern frog DNA filling in gaps. 

 

Douglas Preston's new novel Extinction – really De-extinction — riffs on the 1993 Steven Speilberg epic, substituting in genetic material from a half dozen mammals from the Pleistocene, circa 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago. The animals were cloned from DNA in tiny, preserved ear bones, and doctored a bit. 

 

The resulting animals roam a resort nestled into the remote Colorado Rockies, thanks to biotech company Erebus. At sundown, guests gather at a panoramic window in the lodge's lobby to watch the behemoth herbivores wander to a stream, the mammoths especially beloved. 

 

But unlike Jurassic Park's out-of-control carnivores, the Ice Age bestiary boasts only mellow vegetarians: Irish elk, giant beavers and ground sloths, glyptodonts (armadillos), and woolly rhinoceri and mammoths. The rhino is about the size of a Trader Joe's! 

 

To continue reading, go to Genetic Literacy Project, where this post first appeared.

If a new Planet of the Apes or Jurassic Park film comes out, I'm going to go see it. The latest, Jurassic World:Dominion, didn't disappoint.

 

A Plague of Locusts

 

The science is mostly accurate, the bioethics message obvious, and the plot adheres to Isaac Asimov's "change one thing" rule for science fiction. In the world of Jurassic Park, that lone variable is time. We just have to accept that a "titanosaur" like Argentinosaurus somehow grew and developed from a lab-nurtured baby to a 130-foot-tall and 110-ton adult in a few years.

 

The official summary from IMDb for the new film is vague and continues the impossibly-rapid-growth theme:

Four years after the destruction of Isla Nublar, dinosaurs now live–and hunt–alongside humans all over the world. This fragile balance will reshape the future and determine, once and for all, whether human beings are to remain the apex predators on a planet they now share with history's most fearsome creatures in a new Era.

 

Four years? Animals radiating around the world? Even rats or rabbits couldn't do that. And the film is actually more about insects.

 

To continue reading, go to DNA Science, where this post first appeared.

The latest installment in the Jurassic Park franchise, coming a quarter century after the first film, is about the “genetic power” of the cloned dinosaurs. Only it really isn’t.

The plot is superficially superficial – reviews seem more focused on Bryce Dallas Howard’s improved footwear from the last go-round, pointing out the thin plotline. But many missed the subtleties and subtext of the science.

I scribbled in the dark theater, as I did when reviewing the ridiculous Rampage a few weeks ago. Fallen Kingdom is much better – at least some thinking went into it.

Save the Dinosaurs!

When last we saw the dinos in 2015, they were running amok on Isla Nublar, 150 miles to the west of Costa Rica. Now a huge volcano has started to sputter. What to do? After all, we brought them back, posits Jeff Goldblum, reprising his mathematician-turned-biologist Ian Malcolm persona in the first scene, deploying multisyllabic words when addressing a befuddled senator. The beasts are facing an “extinction level event.”

Continue reading at DNA Science, my blog for Public Library of Science.  Read More 

Gene therapy is experiencing a renaissance, with many of the recent successes in children. For some conditions, the younger the child, the better the genetic correction, because affected tissues degenerate with time. This is the case for adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), the “Lorenzo’s Oil” disease that strips the insulation from brain neurons. One goal of  Read More