I first watched Jurassic Park when I was a few months shy of my ninth birthday. It was a formative experience for my youth. Three decades later, the blockbuster still holds up. I recently watched it with a performance by the Houston Symphony. Still brings the house down.
The premise of the movie is that scientists extracted dinosaur DNA from mosquitos who were trapped in amber. But the DNA found in the mosquitos was incomplete. There would be "massive sequence gaps," as Dr. Ian Malcolm told us. Instead, the scientists had to complete the genetic code with DNA from frogs. While all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were bred to be female, frogs had the power to change their sex. As a result, the dinosaurs were able to breed. And the rest is history.
