Essay/Term paper: Jurassic park

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Cliff Notes

Jurassic Park:  Jurassic Park, the novel by Michael Crichton had many
rich, and interesting characters. Crichton seemed to be able to make them come
alive and jump out of the pages into three-dimensional people. One such
character was John Hammond. This man had dreams of greatness.

Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park, the novel by Michael Crichton had many rich, and interesting
characters. Crichton seemed to be able to make them come alive and jump out of
the pages into three-dimensional people. One such character was John Hammond.
This man had dreams of greatness. He had monstrous plans and the money to back
those plans up. He had always been a child at heart and he was in love with
dinosaurs, much like I am and this is one of the reasons that he was one of my
favorite characters. His company, The Hammond Foundation financed many different
digs for paleontologists. When The Hammond Foundation finds amber with a
mosquito locked in it, John Hammond realizes that perhaps his dreams of having a
dinosaur park are possible. This is because the mosquito locked inside the amber
contains the blood of a real dinosaur, complete with DNA. The finding of the
amber is not shown in the movie. Instead all we see in the movie is the original
amber his foundation found, attached to the top of his cane. The movie starts
with John Hammond inviting Alan Grant and his understudy Ellie Satler to the
park. John Hammond has to hire people to do all of the technical stuff, but it
is he who envisions the park as a whole. He sees the public paying thousands of
dollars to come and see his dinosaurs. He can see the astounded look on peoples
faces when they see creatures that have been extinct for millions of years. He
can see the happy faces of the children as well as the money he will be making
from the operation. John Hammond's fault is that he refuses to believe that
anything could go wrong. He has hired the best experts he could find, and he
places all of his faith in them. When things do start to go completely awry,
Hammond sees them only as minor problems; chinks in the system. John Hammond is
too caught up with the glamour of the idea of Jurassic Park rather than with the
minute details. In fact he refuses to even see the minute details, preferring to
leave them to somebody else. He is content with his delusions of grandeur. I
felt only mild remorse when he died at the end. It is hard to care about
somebody who only cares for himself. Alan Grant was one of the more important
characters of the story. He was a paleontologist who was initially hired by The
Hammond Foundation to do a written report on the foods that a baby dinosaur
might eat. Grant had no idea why he was being asked to do this, but he agreed to
because Hammond was offering an astronomical amount of money for the job. As
time went on, John Hammond invited Grant out to see the small Costa Rican island
that was named Jurassic Park. By this point, the park was almost finished.
Hammond wanted to get the opinion of a real paleontologist. Grant was literally
blown away. He could not believe that there were real live specimens of the
skeletons that he had been studying all of his life. Alan Grant was the person
who made the crucial discovery that the dinosaurs were reproducing on their own.
Grant found an egg shell that he immediately recognized as belonging to a
velociraptor. At first this event seemed to be impossible because the animals
were all hatched in a laboratory, and they were all supposed to be female.
However, Grant realized that the dinosaur DNA that Henry Wu had been working
with had not been all that complete. The missing parts had been filled in with
frog DNA. Unfortunately Wu failed to realize that frogs sometimes have the
ability to switch between being a male and a female. Because of this reason, the
dinosaurs were able to reproduce. Grant was also an integral character because
he was able to survive in the wilds of Jurassic Park and make his way to some
form of safety. When all of the power went out, Alan managed to outsmart the
incredibly ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex. Grant was also one of the few brave
enough to go down into a velociraptor nest and count to find out how many
unknown babies there had been. Grant is also special in that he was one of the
few people to make it off that small Costa Rican island alive. Ellie Satler was
a graduate student under Alan Grant. Her specialty is paleobotany. She travels
to Jurassic Park along with Grant. She is extremely bright, and she knows
volumes about prehistoric plants. She was the one who recognized that the
authentic ferns that were planted throughout the park were extremely toxic to
human beings. She also was the one who realized what was causing the
stegosauruses so many problems. The problem was that the stones that the
stegosauruses swallowed for gizzard stones were surrounded by berries. The
animals swallowed these berries and these berries were very toxic to the
animals. Another thing that Ellie did was comfort people. She made the kids feel
better when they were really upset. She was the person who stayed and took care
of Malcolm when the mathematician was really sick. The woman was also very
self-sacrificing. She was willing to put herself out as bait to distract the
raptors away from Malcolm. The mathematician named Ian Malcolm was also a very
important part of this story. He was invited to preview Jurassic Park along with
Grant and Ellie. Malcolm is a very interesting character because he predicted
the downfall of Jurassic Park right from the very start. Malcolm is a strong
believer in something called the chaos theory. Basically this theory states that
in some systems there are minute unpredictabilities that get magnified and cause
the system to take a completely different course of action. Malcolm claims that
Jurassic Park cannot work because, although it seems to be a simple system, that
this simplicity will not last forever. He claims that small unpredictabilities
in Jurassic Park will soon magnify, and the entire park will never succeed. Ian
Malcolm turns out to be right. This raises an interesting question. If he knew
that the park was doomed to fail, then why did he go and put his life on the
line? Perhaps Malcolm was not accepted from the desire of every human to see a
real live dinosaur. Dr. Henry Wu was the man who was able to create the
dinosaurs in the laboratory. This man was the person smart enough to make the
dinosaurs. He took genetic information from amber and crushed up fossils and
with a lot of experimentation was able to get a DNA strand and clone it to
create a dinosaur. Dr. Wu is truly a brilliant man. He was smart enough to
create safeguards to keep the dinosaurs from escaping. However, he gets so
caught up in the excitement of it all, that he makes a few fatal mistakes.
Because of his ignorance, the dinosaurs were able to reproduce. Dennis Nedry was
also of importance to this story. This is that man who was hired to do all of
the computer programming for Jurassic Park. He turns out to be a traitor,
however. He shuts down all the power, including the electric fences. He then
steals some of the dinosaur embryos to sell to another lab. However, Nedry was
quite stupid. He gets killed because the dinosaurs are out of their fences and a
dilphosarus kills him. Nedry was a rotten character and I had felt little to no
remorse when he died. As I mentioned previously, the initial plan seemed very
amazing. The Hammond Foundation would buy a Costa Rican island, hire the top
people in their fields, and build an amusement park with dinosaurs instead of
rides. The idea was to create a slice of history that people had never been able
to be exposed to before. They had to use some frog DNA to supplement the blood
found in the amber, but that was okay. After all, the frog DNA was so similar to
the dinosaur DNA, that it really did not matter. Early indications that
everything might not be perfect could be seen when babies and small children
started being killed by small reptile-like animals that nobody had ever heard of
before. Soon one of these animals was identified by Grant as a dinosaur. Just
the fact hat dinosaurs had escaped from the park was a major indication that
something was awry. Also, a few workers were getting mauled to death. This would
lead one to believe that perhaps things were not as under control as Hammond and
Wu thought they were. The actual genetics of the project was very interesting.
In order to get the DNA to create the dinosaurs, Wu went to two sources. First
he tried using ground up fossils. By this only had a 20 percent yield for the
DNA that Wu needed. Wu had much better luck using mosquitoes and other biting
bugs that had been fossilized in amber. Often these insects contained the blood
of a dinosaur. With this blood, Wu had almost all of the genetic information
that he needed in order to create a new dinosaur. In order to finish the job, Wu
stuck frog and other amphibian DNA in many places where the strand was
incomplete. Then Wu used some of the most powerful computers known to man to
identify which genetic code he had. From that point, by replicating the
molecule, Wu was able to create a dinosaur.

I had originally chosen to read this novel because of the fact that I have
always enjoyed dinosaurs and they have always been one of my passions. I was
told by one of my fathers friends around 1990, when I was so fascinated about
dinosaurs and around the time of its first release, that this book was a very
good read. I was only six then and I was more interested in books with pictures
rather than a book with 400 pages of writing, so I never did read it until now.
I am also in a Travel and Tourism course and we were currently working on
amusement parks at the time. I had seen the movie adaptation of this book back
in 1994, and its sequel which was released a few years afterwards, but one of my
friends had told me that the novel was much more satisfying. I would have to
agree with my friend. Personally, I thought this was a great book. When I saw
the movie, it was a blast. I loved the movie, but when I read the book for the
first time I was blown away. The story in the novel is somewhat different from
that of the movie, including the outcome of most of the characters. Different
people die and survive in the novel that didn't in the movie. One example is
that there were no stegosauruses in the movie adaptation. These didn't appear
until the sequel. In place of the stegosaurus was a triceratops, which was a
good choice for the triceratops was Alan Grants favorite of all dinosaurs. If
they had kept the exact same story for the movie, I believe it would have been
much better. But I don't really have much authority in saying so. It is really
hard for a director to keep a movie the same as the book for its much easier
writing descriptions than displaying them on the screen. Michael Crichton, the
author of the novel, did help produce it and Steven Spielberg directed the
movie, so maybe they had changed it for the better. For one thing, I do
congratulate them on is the cast. The actors in the movie suit the characters in
the novel perfectly. Also having seen the movie, it made the novel a more fluent
read than most books I have read because there was no need to learn all the
characters. I did really enjoy this novel and would recommend both reading the
novel and watching the movie. They are both great creations and I am going to
read more novels by Michael Crichton and continue to watch Steven Spielberg
films.

Little Lunitic