few hours later they discover that only the auxiliary power has been functional and all the electric fences have been inoperative. The dinosaurs are loose in the park. Someone must get to the maintenance shed to turn on the main power, which Grant succeeds in doing. By this time, Wu and several others have been killed, and Malcolm succumbs to his wounds. The last victim is Hammond himself.

The Costa Rican army evacuates the island and destroys the dinosaurs. On the mainland, Grant learns that unknown animals that eat plants rich in lysine have migrated into the jungle, suggesting that some dinosaurs escaped from the island and adapted to life in the wild. Michael Crichton thus left open the possibility of a sequel, fulfilled with The Lost World (1995).

Jurassic Park is a gripping tale in the scientific thriller genre. This type of story often features characters navigating through a perilous, sometimes enigmatic, environment, striving to reach the safety of their normal lives. Along the way, they may solve a problem or simply focus on survival. Crichton's earlier work, The Andromeda Strain (1969), exemplifies this genre, as scientists face the challenges of an ultra-clean biological lab, risking exposure to a mysterious plague virus to study and contain it. For such thrillers to be both captivating and believable, the author must be well-versed in contemporary science. As an anthropologist and medical doctor, Crichton has leveraged his expertise and research skills into a successful career as a best-selling author of scientific thrillers.

Crichton's success largely stems from an effective blend of reality, fantasy, and paranoia. The primary audience for these novels tends to be college-educated males, more so than females, who are deeply entrenched in the everyday world. A plot that strays too far from reality may not resonate with them, as they lack the science fiction fan's tolerance for stories set in distant futures or faraway worlds, or where society has drastically changed. Thrillers remain grounded in familiar terrains of land and sea, only altered by the protagonist's expert knowledge or that of another significant character or group. Jurassic Park revives a bygone era not through time travel, a common science fiction trope, but through genetic engineering, a biological science already applied in industry. The survivors of the narrative are experts, not in the technicalities of genetic chemistry, but in managing the living population of resurrected dinosaurs, where only the resilient and knowledgeable endure. Even Malcolm, who foresaw the park's downfall, does not survive beyond a day after encountering a full-grown tyrannosaur.

This futuristic environmental novel raises significant concerns about the potential misuse of scientific advancements by industries. It explores the terrifying possibilities when lesser minds apply techniques developed by brilliant innovators in ways never intended by their creators. "Jurassic Park" perfectly encapsulates these fears.

On a secluded island near Costa Rica, a luxury resort is under construction. Its standout attraction promises substantial profits for its American developers and anonymous Japanese investors: a collection of real, living dinosaurs. Each species is housed in its own section of tropical forest to simulate as "natural" an environment as possible. However, maintaining the illusion of untouched nature demands extensive expertise and manpower. By reviving dinosaurs, the designers have not only brought back large, exotic creatures but have also resurrected parts of an ancient ecosystem. These ecosystems are even less understood by humans than the contemporary ones currently being studied by wildlife specialists, from the plains of the Serengeti to the Amazon rainforests.

Just before the park's public opening, a group of experts is invited to tour the facility and provide their endorsement. However, Nature has yet to be consulted. A blend of severe tropical weather and human deceit reveals the park's vulnerabilities, exposing its human inhabitants to the unleashed beasts. This results in a catastrophe akin to a biological Chernobyl, initially destroying its creators and then posing a threat to the outside world. Chaos theory is introduced to help explain these events in modern terms. The technicians at InGen, Inc., the novel's fictional bioengineering company, have achieved the remarkable feat of creating living dinosaurs from DNA fragments extracted from fossils millions of years old. This God-like act, executed without divine wisdom or even the oversight of an Environmental Protection Agency, was carried out secretly on an isolated island in a developing nation ill-equipped to penetrate such secrecy. The project was even shielded from scrutiny by its own investors. The executive leading the operation, an elderly charlatan who plays the role of a kindly old man when it suits him, is a miserly dictator who disregards his well-paid experts and has duped the investors into believing he can fulfill his extravagant promises if granted full control until the park opens.

Chaos theory suggests that intricate events can arise from even the simplest systems when pushed to their limits. Consider the stress on scientists employed by a company that must deliver quarterly profits to investors while also tasked with developing a groundbreaking drug or a superior crop. What shortcuts might be taken to ensure a significant profit in the uncharted territory of genetic research, such as reviving an extinct species, in return for five years of substantial and unmonitored funding? By the time the fateful weekend inspection occurs at Jurassic Park on the remote Isla Nublar—hidden by a constant mist and regarded by superstitious locals as haunted by spirits—the conditions are ripe for a swift loss of human control over the park and its creatures. It's not just profit, prestige, or a few human lives at risk in this catastrophe. From the opening pages of the novel, it's evident that the island's self-imposed but secretive quarantine might have been breached, risking the spread of dangerous and unpredictable genetically-altered species to the mainland. Here, market pressures that typically eliminate unfit companies don't have a chance to intervene. InGen can cause harm before its products are ever publicly scrutinized.

Crichton has built his most successful novels around the marvels and fears people associate with the science they encounter most directly: biology. The only scientist most people regularly interact with is their family doctor, who, through their skills and tools, can prevent much of the illness and premature death that past generations had to accept as inevitable. Today, modern biological scientists have access to tools that allow them to develop theories and techniques beyond the imagination of their predecessors. One such tool is the computer, now so efficiently miniaturized in personal desktop models that even junior scientists can use its power to independently create and test new hypotheses. A Cray super-computer, as mentioned in the novel, no larger than a walk-in closet, can handle the vast amounts of data required to model the complexities of biological entities like DNA strands from living cells. Additionally, there are chemical tools: compounds that can cut chromosomes, the cellular structures carrying genetic information for reproduction, halt chromosome reproduction for detailed study, and splice genes back into chromosomes. Biologists can now not only deeply analyze existing life; they can also readily create new life forms if they choose.

While today's scientists are still far from creating complex creatures like the dinosaurs in the novel, they are closer to achieving this than most people might realize. Crichton skillfully combines his expertise in computers, biology, chemistry, psychology, and the emerging field of chaos theory to craft a compelling, though not entirely foolproof, thriller about resurrecting extinct life and the classic theme of hubris—excessive pride that leads to downfall.

Crichton has acknowledged that his writing is significantly influenced by the nineteenth-century novel Frankenstein (1818). Mary Shelley's work draws heavily from the traditions of gothic horror fiction but also acts as a link to more contemporary literary genres where scientists and similar analytical thinkers, such as detectives, take center stage. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Crichton's narratives evoke memories of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, particularly the Sherlock Holmes series and the adventure novel The Lost World (1912), which features a scientific expedition uncovering a secluded area inhabited by living dinosaurs.

However, it would be incorrect to categorize Crichton as a science-fiction author. This genre stems from distinct origins and generally holds a less conservative philosophy. In Crichton's thrillers, the scientific breakthroughs made by the protagonists never result in lasting change: they either lead to self-destruction, as seen in Jurassic Park, or become irretrievably lost, as in Congo (1980) and Sphere (1987). In science fiction, societal change and adaptation are often viewed as inevitable and even desirable. Despite the fact that part of Crichton's approach, like that of other thriller writers, involves crafting stories as if they truly occurred but were suppressed from public knowledge, he has chosen not to fully unleash his imagination in the way a science-fiction writer might.

Crichton successfully revisited his "Westworld" film's theme of a chaotic theme park in Jurassic Park. In a rare move, he wrote a sequel titled The Lost World (1995), paying tribute to A. Conan Doyle's original novel with the same name and prehistoric theme. This sequel introduces mostly new characters and scenarios connected to InGen's disaster along the Costa Rican coast. It feels as though Crichton may have partly aimed to address critics who argued that the science in the initial novel was lacking. Despite being thematically simpler than Jurassic Park, The Lost World holds its own as an entertaining piece. The characters are engaging, the action is relentless, and perhaps most intriguingly, it offers a plausible explanation to the question that puzzles dinosaur enthusiasts everywhere: why did these captivating creatures become extinct?

In 1993, Michael Crichton and David Koepp transformed Jurassic Park into a screenplay for Universal Studios, with Steven Spielberg as the director. The seasoned actor and director Richard Attenborough was cast as a more benign John Hammond. Sam Neill took on the role of the strong-willed Alan Grant, Laura Dern played the brave Ellie Sattler, and Jeff Goldblum embodied the quirky mathematician Ian Malcolm. Samuel L. Jackson portrayed the engineer John Arnold, while character actor Wayne Knight played Dennis Nedry. Bob Peck took on the role of Muldoon, but the characters of Ed Regis and Donald Gennaro were combined into a single role for Martin Ferrero, featuring aspects of both. The ages of Hammond's grandchildren were swapped, with child actress Ariana Richards playing the tech-savvy Lex and young Joseph Mazzello portraying her dinosaur-enthusiast brother Tim.

Universal allocated $56 million for the film's production. Indoor scenes were filmed in California studios, while outdoor scenes were shot on location in Hawaii. The film's groundbreaking special effects, which won an Academy Award, were developed by a team of experts who had to create new animation techniques as they worked, as nothing of this magnitude had been attempted before. The symphonic score, composed by John Williams, beautifully captures the primal majesty of the world's largest creatures. Dean Cundey handled cinematography, and Michael Kuhn was responsible for film editing.

The film had to condense the time Grant and the children spent lost in the park; the river journey to the hunting lodge, for instance, was omitted. Some of the senior staff's fates were altered. Grant and Sattler are considering marriage, a decision delayed by Grant's aversion to children, which changes by the film's conclusion. Hammond's character is significantly softened, so poetic justice doesn't demand his death by dinosaurs, nor does Ian Malcolm meet a tragic end. The ultimate fate of Jurassic Park's dinosaurs is left unresolved, sparing the audience from witnessing the destruction of these awe-inspiring yet dangerous creatures.

The film Jurassic Park earned six times its production costs in the U.S. market alone and has accumulated millions more worldwide from theater tickets.

The movie has become a cultural phenomenon. The National Basketball Association even named a new team the Raptors, in tribute to the fierce velociraptors that nearly kill all the surviving humans on the island. The film's success extended to videotape sales, a Books on Tape version, computer games, and a children's adaptation of the novel, partly due to the heightened public interest in dinosaurs and other paleontological discoveries.