Dino DNA

By John Skow

JURASSIC PARK

by Michael Crichton

Knopf; 413 pages; $19.95

Ah, there, Dr. Frankenstein, mucking about with dinosaur DNA are you? Good strong fence around the lab, hmmm? But the villagers seem a bit restless anyway? Well, what do they know?

At least for the purpose of this new techno-thriller, his best by far since The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton accepts the charge that genetic research these days is a headlong, unregulated profit-and-glory grab by microbiologists with more skill than wisdom. Suppose, says Crichton, that a respectable paleozoologist (call him Alan Grant) begins to get increasingly detailed queries from a secretive corporate donor about what infant dinosaurs ate. Grant sends in his best guess. More questions follow, and they have a ring of urgency. What is this?

Sure enough, Grant soon is choppering down on an island off Costa Rica. He notices a tree trunk, graceful and limbless, rising 50 ft. above the surrounding vegetation. It turns and looks at him. Yes, a dinosaur. An entire island crawling and stomping with them, in fact, intended to be the world's most exciting theme park, as soon as a few flaws are worked out.

Crichton's sci-fi is convincingly detailed. He has the cloning process begin not with ground-up fossils (too much DNA deterioration) but with dinosaur blood sucked by mosquito-like insects caught and preserved in amber. As is traditional in such narrations, there is an arrogant technician, who in this case claims that the park's dinosaurs can't breed because all have been sterilized. And as usual there is a relentlessly cheerful p.r. man. He settles the question of what dinosaurs eat; one of the big carnivores eats him. Then things really go wrong. Dinosaurs, it develops, are much smarter and faster moving than the experts had thought.

The author's mood at the end is dour; a character who seems to speak for him, a mortally wounded expert in chaos theory, crabs at modern science for its narrow, intrusive brilliance and its broad lack of common sense. Yes, yes, the reader agrees without much enthusiasm. Thinking all the while: if you really could clone a tyrannosaur, wouldn't it be worth it, just to hear the thing roar?