3 - Cloning Reptiles​

Soft tissue and blood vessels preserved within hindlimb elements of Tyrannosaurus rex (Museum of the Rockies specimen 1125), as described in this study. ​

Henry Wu is a quintessential InGen personality.

Much like Hammond, and the other figures that breathed the rarefied air of early de-extinction at the time, Wu is in equal parts loathed and revered by the public. A visionary geneticist to some, and a ruthless conman to others, he has left a lasting impact on popular culture, and on the public's relationship with privately-funded science.

Parsing the man from the legend is no easy task, particularly since Wu has taken considerable pains to cultivate his own mythology, and downplay the accusations levelled against him, over the years.

Even his increasingly reclusive lifestyle, and attempted distancing from recent events, have done little to quell the appetite for interviews, opinion pieces, and biographies that seek to either celebrate or deconstruct his aura.

One personality trait, however, appears consistently in all accounts: boundless, obsessive ambition.

Wu had been Atherton's student, and the two kept frequently in touch during the 1970s. Wu didn't share his mentor's boisterous demeanour: he was quiet and unassuming, seemingly a losing trait in the ferociously competitive world of academia at the time. But behind this muted appearance was a razor-sharp intellect, and one that agreed with Atherton on a crucial point: the ability of genetic engineering to deliver miracles. (1)

Most of Wu's PhD colleagues at the time were throwing themselves headlong into the potential medical applications of genetic engineering, sensing an opportunity for lucrative pharmaceutical contracts, or out of a selfless desire to push public health to the next level.

A minority buzzed around the same slick, but vague concepts that animated InGen at the time – consumer biologicals. Wu's doctoral work, however, revolved around the preservation of ancient tissue in the fossil record, and perhaps even ancient DNA.

In his free time, Wu attended a number of talks that were nominally outside his field: paleontological conferences and panels dealing with the few, and far-in-between, discoveries of fossilised soft tissue from extinct animals. These discoveries have since multiplied, but at the time, serious doubts remained about the ability of even mineralised soft tissue to preserve in rock, let alone actual DNA. The former was widely considered a rare and unlikely occurrence. The latter, effectively impossible. (2)

Partially thanks to his own lab work, and partially through sheer thick-headedness, Wu became convinced that the consensus on how long soft tissue could remain intact was wrong. Given the right conditions, he was certain that soft parts of once-living animals could survive the strenuous test of Deep Time. In exceptional cases, even some of the DNA might be preserved, and sequenced.

These opinions were considered radical and unsupported at the time. And yet we now know that Wu was right. (3)

It is important to emphasise that no-one at the time, not even Henry Wu, was remotely considering the prospect of cloning extinct animals. As early attempts showed, the technology to successfully clone even living animals was still far away. Wu knew this better than most, as he kept tabs of Atherton's repeated, failed attempts to produce more miniature elephants. (4)

Soft tissue preservation was (and still is) exciting to palaeontologists, because it provides unique information on extinct life, information that is otherwise lost forever. Consider living animals like elephants, hippos, sparrows, or peacocks: how much of their outward appearance, let alone behaviour, could you discern from the skeletal anatomy alone? The answer is, very little. (5)

To Wu, the technical challenge of recovering partial genetic information that had survived for millions of years had an appeal all of its own. Ancient DNA might also provide useful practical information on the changes to the storing and reading of genetic information over long periods of time; an eminently useful reference for ambitious genetic engineering.

Indeed, Wu believed that an extensive modelling on how DNA evolved in nature, over long periods of time, might jump-start scientific knowledge on how to replicate, or even surpass, the same changes in a lab setting, and on much shorter timescales.

Ultimately, though, the field was in its infancy. The discovery of DNA had happened within the lifetime of many adults of this period, the human genome itself hadn't been completely mapped, and there was much yet to be discovered.

Therefore, Wu's interest was still a far cry from dreaming of the resurrection of ancient life-forms. But it was a mile marker on the road to obsession.

The first qualitative jump in Henry Wu's thinking came when Atherton died. After attending a conference on fossilised dinosaur skin impressions, Wu travelled to California for his old mentor's funeral. There, the young scientist would come face to face with John Hammond for the first time.

Hammond had heard of Henry Wu before, from Atherton himself, and after perfunctory exchanges of grief, he launched into a tirade about consumer biologicals, the death of the miniature elephant, his need for a new chief geneticist, and his frustration that Atherton had died before they could fulfil their vision together.

If Wu was taken aback by Hammond's emotional detachment, it didn't show. Sensing an opportunity, he quietly and politely asked Hammond what exactly that vision was.

Put on the spot, Hammond didn't have a good answer. The capital was in place. A small core of staff had been hired, along with office and lab space in Palo Alto. After a few vague references about the bright future of genetic engineering, Hammond turned the question around on Wu, and asked what he would do, if he had access to InGen's resources.

Himself now put on the spot, Wu imitated Hammond's strategy of making up an answer on his feet. Money was money, after all, and he had nothing to lose by trying to impress this dreamy venture capitalist. Thinking back to the dinosaur conference he'd attended before the funeral, Wu delivered an answer that has since entered the mythology of de-extinction.

"I would be cloning reptiles," he said.

And in the space of five years, that is exactly what he would be doing.

Footnotes:

(1) In the original Jurassic Park canon, it is Hammond that tasks Wu with cloning extinct animals, and specifically dinosaurs, originally without sharing what exactly he was asking him to do until Wu had cloned baby elephants and living reptiles. I think this version is more compelling. Hammond is a giant as it is, and does not need even more singular emphasis thrown on his role in the story. Wu, on the other hand, could benefit from the extra characterisation. Much like Hammond, he will walk the line between greatness and villainy for the remainder of his life.

(2) To be clear, we now have an incredible (and constantly growing) array of soft tissue samples from extinct animals. There are too many to list here, but just to cite a few: we have a dinosaur tail in amber, preserved dinosaur collagen , and the Tyrannosaurus rex soft tissue shown above, sourced here.

(3) Spectacularly so! I've left the most mind-blowing find for last. In 2021, Chinese palaeontologists uncovered femur cartilage from Caudipteryx, a small feathered dinosaur that died in a volcanic event in China. The carcass ended up at the bottom of an anoxic (that is, oxygen-free) lake, where it was essentially mummified before it could decay. The individual cells are still visible in the cartilage. In fact, palaeontologists decalcified the cartilage, isolated some of the cells, and stained them. Incredibly, some of the cells were so well-preserved that you can still see the nucleus, thanks to the stain! Some original biomolecules and threads of chromatin are still visible. So, if you've ever wondered what a dinosaur nucleus looked like during the Mesozoic… look no further.

(4) Once again, to be clear: we ain't getting Jurassic Park in the real world, folks. At least, I personally don't think so, though I would be happy to be proven wrong. None of the findings illustrated in the previous footnotes come even close to containing usable genetic material. Even the mammoth de-extinction project is more about giving an Asian elephant fur than it is about reviving the original species. The level of DNA preservation required for this story to function is completely fictional – you might call it the alien space bat, without which the story could not take place.

(5) This is actually a consistent problem when we reconstruct extinct animals. No dinosaur reconstruction will ever be truly right, as there is simply too much information we are missing. However, even reconstructions that are faithful to the skeletal anatomy might be misleading. If you had never seen a human, except as a skeleton, would you expect it to have hair? And that's one of the mildest examples. Muscles can be inferred from the bones, but then there's fat, skin (which can be taut, or flappy, or ossified, or…), crests, skin coverings, all manner of colours and display structures. The "All Yesterdays" movement (originated with a book of the same name ) has a few speculative reconstructions of dinosaurs that hide their skeletal anatomy under unexpected features, like modern animals do. The book also has a hilarious section, called "All Todays", which speculates how future palaeontologists might reconstruct living animals, if they followed the same criteria we use for dinosaurs. Have fun!