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A Nobel Prize or a financial empire awaits somewhere in a darkened room, in a dirty,
derelict building, somewhere in the Pacific.
It was the flowering of an ambition born fifty years ago. Fifty years struggle come to this.
When I was little I dreamed of a time when the entire world was covered by an ancient forest.
Great hunters stalked in the cool darkness,
among the silent, huge columnar trees – oaks and sequoias.
I left home at fifteen, with the rather romantic idea of seeking my fortune.
I remember the train ride south; in my best clothes, eating an apple, the entire world before me.
When I came to London I had neither fortune, nor education nor connections – nothing.
The mysterious John Hammond: shady investor, multimillionaire, jovial mad scientist.
An idea brought me awake one morning in New York, I almost didn't write it down.
What if a mosquito sucked the blood of a dinosaur, one hundred million years ago?
The insect is then covered in tree sap which, over the millennia, becomes amber.
The insect is preserved, perfectly.
But you see, and here's the clever part, wouldn't the dinosaur blood be preserved as well?
The blood holds DNA, a tiny spiral of genetic code. Abracadabra!
Sunlight angled down through the dusty air in Norman's office and I leaned against a solid oak table,
as I outlined my plans for International Genetic Technologies.
The first task was genetic recovery: acquiring Jurassic or Cretaceous amber,
extracting preserved DNA and reassembling the complete sequences.
“Bringing it up the well” we called it.
I spared no expense, permitted no failures.
If we succeeded, the InGen technology would be historic.
We were planning to conquer time's power over life, its power to extinguish and erase.
It would change all our lives, as profoundly, as irrevocably as the atomic bomb.