Jurassic Park: “Frog DNA” Battleground
Summer 1993 — The American box office was about to be rocked back to the Mesozoic Era. We now recognize Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park as a cornerstone of sci-fi and adventure cinema, largely due to one special ingredient that helps bring its dino immersion to life: legit, actual science.
At least that’s what audiences were lead to believe. With the benefit of hindsight, a retrospective look on the Jurassic science melting-pot shows some cracks in its armor — and to my surprise, a genuine testament to science dissemination done right.
In the film, science serves as exposition, backstory, and filler all at once… Overall it works wonders in selling the narrative’s believability, but when we look deeper, is it even close to being accurate? And more importantly, why does that question even matter?
First, let’s tease the scene in question. Then comes the good stuff. Take it away, Mr. DNA!
Truly one of the best. There’s plenty to unpack in this scene, but let’s quickly backtrack just a bit. Before Jurassic Park even hit cinemas, audiences really hadn’t gotten a quality glimpse before dinosaurs on screen. Emphasis here on quality — there were plenty of dino flicks before 1993, but the bar was set hilariously low.
When Jurassic Park was released, the movie was instantly praised for it’s detail and “grandeur” (to quote Roger Ebert’s original 3-star review) — but as the ultimate kicker, the Man vs Dino storyline seemed almost possible. Humans and dinosaurs weren’t brought face-to-face through outlandish mechanisms like time-travel or reality-bending, but cloning.
In 1993, cloning science was still incredibly mysterious. It was a known element of biological research, but for context Dolly the Sheep wasn’t “born” until 1996 and the Human Genome Project still had ten years left until completion.
This brings us back to Mr. DNA and the lovable walk through our visitors get upon arrival to the park. The style and voice of this sequence plays down the science to an elementary level, which is actually a well-documented method to make science more accessible. Older audiences will often reject science being dumbed down (Haggis, 2006), but are less likely to put up such extreme barriers when watching something “made for kids” in the first place.
“Well the film obviously needs to explain this. You know, for the kids. Not for me.” — Adults everywhere
So Mr. DNA is hugely successful in breaking these barriers and getting an adult audience to bite. But what exactly has Speilberg been feeding them? This specific sequence is all over the place: you’ve got fossilization, needle drilling, virtual reality, genetic sequencing… and I kid you not, depending on where you look almost all of it is factually inaccurate. Let’s look at one specific little thought nugget though — the one I find most interesting. Frog DNA.
Even as a kid, I knew this was a big load of gumbo. The understanding that dinosaurs are close relatives of birds rather than reptiles started to reach the American public around the year 1969, when paleontologist John Ostrom starting disseminating the theory at a broad scale, however the first ideas connecting dinosaurs and birds dates back a hundred years earlier to 1859. Hell, Disney even included a flying feathered dino way back in Fantasia in 1940.
But even by 1993 and Jurassic Park, it still wasn’t widely accepted by the vast American public. That’s even reinforced in a freaking plot point in the movie when Doctor Grant is first introduced — at the notion that raptors evolved into birds, he’s laughed off by the gathering crowd and that one really annoying kid. Paleontologists absolutely knew the truth, but the public sure didn’t.
For one final slice of evidence, look at the trends in books from 1950 to 2000, the terms “dinosaurs” and “birds” didn’t surpass similar comparisons to reptiles until the early 1990s. Actually, it was 1993.
So why did the film cite frog DNA as the key to unlocking dinos? The first reason follows this evidence above — the public may have heard that dinosaurs evolved into present-day birds but they likely didn’t believe it, at least not quite yet. The biggest reason, however, is simply the film’s exposition. In backing the whole “Life will find a way” theme to the narrative, the frog DNA enables the dinosaurs to change sex and breed. Nature is able to break through the limits of the park’s scientific hold and flourish. I actually think Crichton’s 1990 novel explains this best:
“…By the way,” he said, turning to Grant, “if they’re all born females, how do they breed? You never explained that bit about the frog DNA.”
“It’s not frog DNA,” Grant said. “It’s amphibian DNA. But the phenomenon happens to be particularly well documented in frogs. Especially West African frogs, if I remember.”
“What phenomenon is that?”
“Gender transition,” Grant said. “Actually, it’s just plain changing sex.”
In the case of Jurassic Park, Crichton and Spielberg were given a clear choice. The plot required this slight manipulation of scientific fact, but luckily for them, the audience would hardly care to begin with. The narrative confronts the science head-on and is able to convince audiences that “yes!” this cloning is legit. We’re taking real-life science and pushing it into fictional limits, but it’s all there, the DNA code and VR and everything.
By the time Mr. DNA leaves the screen, most audiences don’t care whether that was a frog or bird to begin with, but the seed is already planted. It feels legitimate because it’s masked by real science and communicated in a method that’s nonintrusive.
And here’s the real kicker — something I uncovered in my research for the article that I wasn’t expecting. Believe it or not, as reaffirmed by recent research well-after the 1993 bluff, that frog DNA line actually does check out.
Because so much of the genome is “junk” random code, and because of the similarities in this junk between species, certain DNA can be cloned or replicated using host cells that are not linked to the original species, like viruses or bacteria (one source here but there are many others).
So, filling in gaps in dino DNA by using frog hosts: shockingly plausible.
The real misstep in Jurassic Park’s science comes from the half-life of DNA, discovered in 2012. Turns out that mosquito blood would degrade before we could even extract a readable copy of dino genome (and another source here). Amazing that what was once believable in 1993 is now impossible, and what once felt like complete bologna now isn’t too far-fetched.
Food for thought: scientific accuracy is all a matter of timing.
I want to end this article with a short postulate, one that will be ongoing for my posts to come in later weeks. What Crichton and Spielberg did in shaping their science was very deliberate: catering to an audience middle-ground between complete science novices and expert-level academics.
This is a tactic that we’ll see very frequently in narrative science communication. The level of enjoyment of a viewer (at least when references to actual science are concerned) depends on two variables: the viewer’s own scientific literacy, and the intensity of science as it appears on screen. Aiming for a moderate territory of science-lingo maximizes the amount of enjoyment a film can extract for viewers at all levels — at the sacrifice of both accuracy and simplicity comes a greater engagement with the viewer.
The balancing act is incredibly challenging to navigate. As I said above, audiences prefer the middle-ground — scientific structure that sounds believable, likely reinforced by an elementary understanding of the topic or overgeneralized statements made by the media, but does not hold itself to the same restrictions that only true scientists would be able to identify.
The “frog DNA” is a perfect case study. Tease the audience with accuracy in order to camouflage your leap into the impossible. In the end, the experience builds viewers’ trust and ushers them into a more believable world. Or, as it was first said in the 1993 review in the New York Times:
“You will believe you have spent time in a dino-filled world.”
And don’t give CGI all the credit.
