Companies almost never call emergency board meetings – the game of business occurs between board meetings. Board meetings are the whistle at the end of the quarter, or to close out the game and move to the next phase of a season. We find a sketchy geneticist, Lewis Dodgson, who has hired Nedry – the mole inside Jurassic Park. Crichton uses competitive intelligence to tell us more about InGen, rather than continuing with exposition.

From the outset, the reader has thought, “who are these madmen at InGen pursuing such a reckless plan?”

Here, Crichton shows us that they are relatively moderate compared to their competitors down the road. In fact, in a world without Biosyn, we never get the pending shutdown of the island’s IT systems which leads to the catastrophic failure. Were it not for corporate shenanigans, perhaps we create a universe where the park is peaceful and dinosaurs become a slow, incremental part of an alternate reality.

Best Writing, Quotes

“What they have done,” Dodgson said, “is build the greatest single tourist attraction in the history of the world. … And then there is the merchandising. [Italics are Crichton’s.] The picture books, T-shirts, video games, caps, stuffed toys, comic books, and pets.” –

Crichton’s Jurassic Park Page 77

If Crichton was genre-blind to what he was creating with this book, he certainly was able to see the future with this quote. The franchise has brought in over $7 billion across movies, merchandise, video games and more.

Page by Page Highlights, Quotes

“Depending on who you talked to, Lewis Dodgson was famous as the most aggressive geneticists of hsi generation, or the most reckless. Thirty-four, balding, hawk-faced, and intense, he had been dismissed by Johns Hopkins as a graduate student, for planning ene therapy on human patients without obtaining the proper FDA protocols. … he had conducted the controversial rabies vaccine test in Chile….” – Page 74

“InGen’s start-up in 1983, with Japanese investors. The purchase of three Cray XMP supercomputers. The purchase of Isla Nublar in Costa Rica. The stockpiling of amber.” Page 75

“Then in 1987, Ingen bought an obscure company called Millipore Plastic Products in Nashville, Tennessee. … plastic could be shaped into an egg and used to grow chick embryos.” – Page 76

“What they have done,” Dodgson said, “is build the greatest single tourist attraction in the history of the world. … And then there is the merchandising. [Italics are Crichton’s.] The picture books, T-shirts, video games, caps, stuffed toys, comic books, and pets.” – Page 77

“Nobody spoke. Nobody went on record. They just nodded silently.” – Page 78