Jurassic World Rebirth Perfectly Captures One of Science’s Biggest Ethical Dilemmas

At the heart of Jurassic Park, the classic book and now heptalogy of films, is an ethical debate. From the first, Dr. Ian Malcolm spells it out with crystal clarity: “God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.” By Jurassic Park Rebirth, a film that prefers to show rather than tell, such moralizing about genetic engineering is found in the appearance of “D-Rex.” This mutant abomination with a set of human-proportioned arms, a bulbous cranium, and endless appetite for humans lets us very clearly know that tinkering with dino DNA is simply not a good idea.

In other words, this series tells us, even if we could bring back dinosaurs, we shouldn’t.

Not that it really matters. The possibility of bringing back dinosaurs IRL is and will likely forever be entirely fictional. DNA is fragile. As soon as it’s outside the comforting confines of a living cell, it starts to break down. So far, the oldest DNA anyone’s ever found is 2.4 million years old — nowhere close to the youngest dinosaur fossils ever found at 65 million years old.

That’s not to say such lessons in genetic engineering don’t have teeth. After all, bringing back other species isn’t a sci-fi concept — it’s something real-world geneticists and conservationists are doing today. Their goal is to save species that are on the verge of extinction or even bring back some that were lost long ago. So even though we can’t bring back dinosaurs, the question that Jurassic Park raises is an important one: Should we?

Jack Horner, regents professor of paleontology
at Montana State University, who also consulted on several of the Jurassic Park films, firmly believes science is about discovery. “That’s the cool thing about science: It really is about exploring,” he tells Inverse. “When you’re exploring, especially when you don’t put limits on it, you never know what you’re going to find.” He adds that, later, if there are issues then we could “ban it or regulate it or do whatever.”

The Environmental Concerns

Horner and his team are, in fact, working on bringing dinosaurs back to life. Or something close. They’re creating Dinochicken — a chicken that’s been genetically engineered to have features of a dinosaur. And he’s not the only one tinkering with ancient DNA. Earlier this year, Colossal Bioscience announced that it’d resurrected the dire wolf. (It’s a similar situation to a Dinochicken though, where the team modified the genomes of gray wolves.)

The progress has some researchers worried. Regulations around so-called de-extinction are non-existent, and they say that science is forging ahead without oversight and without regard for the consequences. (Hmm, sound familiar?)

Bringing back extinct species is our very own CTRL + ALT + delete for driving these creatures to extinction in the first place.

On the one hand, bringing back extinct species is our very own CTRL + ALT + delete for driving these creatures to extinction in the first place. “I think the dire wolf is absolutely a symbol of hope,” bioethicist and Colossal adviser Alta Charo said in a video by Colossal. “Along the way, you’ve learned all these things you need to know to salvage populations that haven’t gone extinct yet.” But other researchers say that this obsession with de-extinction ignores the problems that lead to those animals disappearing in the first place. A technological fix “would not address the reasons for the decline in the population, … and it would not return [animals] into their historical range,” writes genetics researcher Oliver Ryder in a paper discussing the ethics of using gene editing on the northern white rhino, which is extinct in the wild.

Jurassic World Rebirth addresses such with its very premise. Over three decades after the introduction — and accidental rewilding — of dinosaurs, they’re dying everywhere, except for a small band around the equator. For these big bad creations who have been gone for more than 65 million years, there’s nothing even close to a historic range, so a few dangerous islands are about all they can handle.

Doctor Moreau’s Dilemma

Ethic aside, bringing back species is practically difficult. Scientists not only have to genetically make the thing but also work out how to bring it into this world. It’s part of the reason why we don’t see woolly mammoths roaming around yet — there’s no surrogate elephant big enough. In Jurassic Park, Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler watch from their movie-seats-turned-theme-park-ride-chairs as scientists in Hammond’s lab carefully lay surrogate ostrich and emu eggs in an incubator. Jurassic World Rebirth offers up transparent fluid-filled tanks as a stand-in for the eggs. The issue of surrogacy is far from so simple.

For one, the animals involved are likely to suffer, said Robert Klitzman, professor of psychiatry and director of the bioethics master’s program at Columbia University, in Time magazine. “There’s a risk of death. There’s a risk of side effects that are severe.” Take Celia the Pyrenean ibex goat. She was the result of 782 donor domestic goat eggs, which turned into 407 viable embryos, about half of which were transferred into 57 surrogates. Despite the effort, as soon as she was born, she was gasping for air and died minutes later when her misshapen lungs gave out.

Scientists do tend to avoid Doctor Moreau levels of suffering, though, thanks to strict international gene editing regulations. No half-human half-animal hybrids screech in pain while being experimented on. No one is “becoming as remorseless as nature” in order to study it.

No one is “becoming as remorseless as nature” in order to study it.

Even still, questionable things do happen. In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the scientific world when he created genetically edited babies. (The issue there was that he modified so-called germ cells that can be passed onto future generations, which is a no-no and different from modifying body cells like what happens in gene therapy.) He justified his actions by saying he was helping eliminate suffering. Seven years on, no one knows if the babies are happy and healthy.

Say an animal does survive and is healthy. The next issue is where do you put it? It’s unlikely they’ll be allowed to roam where they please (at least for a little while) like in Jurassic World Rebirth, where they have their own cluster of islands and wreak havoc. Similarly, the dire wolf hybrids are destined to live out their entire lives in their very own Isla Nublar of sorts — a 2,000 acre ecological preserve in a secret location. Not a bad life according to Colossal’s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro. “I think they are the luckiest animals ever,” she told Time. Sure, but their habit is not exactly a sustainable one if scientists are looking to scale up.

DNA for Dollars

Another major tension in the films is between money-driven individuals (Hammond, Benjamin Lockwood) or corporations (Masrani Global Corporation, InGen) trying to cash in on our curiosity and governments and the United Nations trying to protect the public interest (and limbs!). Bringing back dinosaurs would mean keeping profit-driven motives in check, similar to how we’re already grappling with developing global guidelines for AI, all while Big Tech is using a shift in government to ease regulations against its growth.

But maybe we could ease our moral worries if there was some big payoff to resurrecting dinosaurs, say, like a medical marvel. In Jurassic World Rebirth, the pharmaceutical research company Parker-Genex sends ScarJo, along with a paleontologist, played by Jonathan Bailey, and team lead played by Mahershala Ali, in search of dinosaur DNA (extracted only from a live specimen, naturally) from the largest dinosaurs to chase a cure-all for heart disease.

Scientists are already using ancient human DNA to understand how and why diseases like multiple sclerosis develop. Geneticists have also studied ancient DNA from other creatures like dogs or parasites for the benefit of human health. Horner, too, says his team has found clues to what triggers the bone disorder ankylosing spondylitis while trying to create Dinochicken.

But what happens when a profit motive and DNA research come together? When the Human Genome Project first got underway, some researchers worried that the rush to commercialize products would block scientific inquiry. “It’s basically people with a lot of human genome money trying to cash in,” an anonymous source told The New York Times in 1994. And in an attempt to pull itself out of financial trouble, ancestry company 23andMe ended up being sued for trying to sell people’s DNA.

Horner doesn’t think profit motives are a likely problem for de-extinction. “They’re not going to commercialize it. If you’re bringing back a dire wolf or a mammoth elephant, it’s not like they’re going to crank them out,” he says. But what’s to stop Colossal or some other private venture starting to charge for people to see de-extinct animals?

At the end of the day, most people have to admit they would love to see a dinosaur. Horner is one of them. “I think it would be fantastic. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t,” he says.