Tech-Master Disaster: Part Three
We’re talking to Robin Scheffler and Joanna Radin about the non-fictional and fictional worlds of biotech in Kendall Square, Cambridge. Listen today at 2 pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
We’re rounding out our Tech-Master Disaster series with the ultimate Tech-Master Disaster: Jurassic Park, considered in light of the milieu where Michael Crichton dreamt it up. We spoke first with Robin Scheffler of MIT about the real-world effects of the biotech boom in Kendall Square of Cambridge, Mass., then we talked to Joanna Radin about one of the most significant pop-culture figures to flourish in Kendall Square: Michael Crichton.
The capital of the tech-masters also nurtured the imagination of the major pop writer on tech-master perils. What sort of a world would Crichton have encountered in Cambridge? What sort of thinking guided him to imagine a private island overrun by deadly genetic innovations?
Robin Scheffler first guided us through the real-world biotech zone of Kendall Square. We spoke by pharmaceutical offices, by lab-sharing facilities for biotech startups, and by the ironically funded Koch Building for Cancer Research.
The issue isn’t with the science, we hear in this show; it’s with capital. How does money steer or limit research agendas, how does it literally shape our world? Here are some images of one way in which that shaping happens:
Robin Scheffler describes Kendall Square chillingly in the episode: it’s a world of glass and steel, and quite labyrinthine.
Looking at the place, you can imagine science fiction stories springing forth. It’s not hard to see how Michael Crichton could be inspired to create the lab fantasies and nightmares of Jurassic Park while on a fellowship at MIT.
Joanna Radin of Yale talked about the insight’s Crichton refined about the culture behind science—insights refined as a Harvard student and, later, when he was on fellowship at MIT.
He had a medical degree from Harvard in the late ‘60s, and before that he had an undergraduate degree from Harvard in anthropology, where he studied the intersection of biology and anthropology. And it was at Harvard that he got a lot of the ideas for many, many, many of his books and movies and TV—but also where he learned how to think about science like an anthropologist.
So what that means is: he started to realize that science (while it produced incredible innovations and ideas) had its own culture. And you could look at the way that scientists made knowledge; the way they funded their research; the way that they argued for what questions needed to be studied—and that that itself would be fascinating to readers.
Read: Next
Joanna Radin mentioned Crichton’s Next as his novelistic expression of anxieties over eugenics in contemporary science. And Next is also his story clearest about science that operates through cultural terms — it’s an example of Crichton-as-anthropologist-of-science, or Crichton as an STS-minded writer (STS being the field of “Science, Technology, and Society”). It includes passages such as:
The ultimate lesson is that science isn’t special—at least not anymore. Maybe back when Einstein talked to Niels Bohr, and there were only a few dozen important workers in every field. But there are now three million researchers in America. It’s no longer a calling, it’s a career. Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. Its practictioners aren’t saints, they’re human beings, and they do what human beings do—lie, cheat, steal from one another, sue, hide data, fake data, overstate their own importance, and denigrate opposing views unfairly. That’s human nature. It isn’t going to change.
Watch: Jurassic World
Jurassic Park is our Frankenstein, as Professor Radin tells us—it’s our science fiction story that will endure. And like Frankenstein, it has its share of adaptations. The film franchise restarted a few years ago with Jurassic World, which takes a postmodern approach to an already intensely postmodern source narrative.
The original was about a theme park, but this one is about a theme park dedicated to the first theme park. It exists at one additional stage of fantasy and warped reality, and it explores that ramped-up fantasizing. Now, the dinosaurs are more thoroughly modified. The villainous animal here is the fictional Indominus Rex, both a fictional invention and a laboratory invention. Fiction, entertainment, and science merge here; they’re all of a piece.
Listen: Prokofiev
You can’t completely think of the Jurassic Park film— or Indiana Jones, or Star Wars, or Jaws—without thinking of the music of John Williams. The New York Times once sought to link specific influences to Williams’s work for Star Wars, and one of the works cited was Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Can we draw a line connecting ballet with Jurassic Park? The film is intensely musical — next time you watch it, notice how the film’s scored with an orchestral lushness rivaling its paleobotanical vegetation.
This Week’s Ephemeral Library:
The MacArthur foundation has announced this year’s geniuses. Jeet Heer on impeachment clarity. On four years in Silicon Valley. The Hunter Biden story.
Impeachment show ideas anyone? We’ll take a deep dive next week, wherever that leads.
Take it easy but take it as the great Studs Terkel said.
See you next week!
