The Committee to Destroy the World

CHAPTER 7 Welcome to Jurassic Park

In addition to being an enormously entertaining movie, Jurassic Park (1993) is a cautionary tale of technology gone wild. The film, and Michael Crichton’s novel from which it was adapted, are modern twists on the ancient Prometheus myth and Mary Shelley’s nineteenth-century horror story Frankenstein, in which an obsessed Dr. Victor Frankenstein dared to play God and created a monster that destroyed everything most dear to him. Misusing technology is an age-old tale that visited Wall Street in 2008 with dire results.

In one scene in Jurassic Park, the scientists who are brought to the park to evaluate its progress and safety for its insurers and financiers get into a heated debate over lunch with the park’s founder, Dr. John Hammond, about the merits of trying to fool with Mother Nature. They had just witnessed a velociraptor devour a cow in a matter of seconds in a display of savagery that, among other things, renders them uninterested in their meal. Dr. Ian Malcolm, a professor of chaos theory (brilliantly played by the actor Jeff Goldblum) begins shouting at Dr. Hammond that he is tempting fate by blindly using technology without respecting its potentially destructive power:

The problem with the scientific power you’ve used is it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge yourselves, so you don’t take the responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders ...