Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park in 1990, the movie came out in 1993… and today in 2025, 32 years after the above scene was shot, “science” has caught up to literature.
Hey! Play the video and hear Dr. Malcolm’s objections: then go on to the resurrected dire wolves.
Is it real or is it Memorex?
By now you’ve probably heard the rejoicing, the congratulating, and the bragging–“We’ve brought the dire wolf back from extinction! Ain’t we the onions!” Dire wolves, supposed to have gone extinct some 12,500 years ago, are very similar to today’s grey wolf, only much bigger and stronger. Brought to you by Colossal Biosciences, Dallas, TEX (https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/07/science/dire-wolf-de-extinction-cloning-colossal/index.html)!
Good grief. Crichton got it almost word for word, and 30-plus years early.
Now, think. Would it be immoral, or irresponsible, to “bring back” through scientific legerdemain some animal that only went extinct, in modern times, because people killed it off? Australia’s thylacine, say. It should still be here–right? We have film clips of the last one living in a zoo in the 1930s.
I think most people would say, “Oh, yeah, okay. We shouldn’t have wiped ’em out.”
The dire wolf probably, we don’t know for sure, died out because it couldn’t compete with humans for the same meat. It’s possible that that theory is malarkey. The fact is, for reasons unknown as yet to science, the Ice Age came, the Ice Age went, and Ice Age animals like the dire wolf, the sabertoothed cat, and the woolly mammoth went with it. Could human hunters have been responsible for all that extinction? Or a unique, way-against-the-odds concatenation of rare events?
With so much remaining to be understood, is it wise–is it even humane?–to just yell “Damn the unknowns, full speed ahead!”? Michael Crichton spent several decades warning us not to do that. Funny, isn’t it? His books were tremendous best-sellers, and yet no one seems to have listened to him.
Happens all the time.
God help us.
