A Jurassic Park Passage About Health Policy

I wouldn’t let my son watch Jurassic Park until we finished reading Michael Crichton’s original 1990 novel. This was to teach him the informational superiority of books over video as a medium. The movie version released three years later was certainly a great film, but no movie producer could possibly capture the full extent of Crichton’s novel.

Somehow missed among all the dino action in the film is the book’s critique of the commercialization of science. I actually disagree with what that book is trying to say. The commercialization of science is great. Yet, much like how I disagree with Oliver Stone’s intended message in his 1987 movie Wall Street, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park has passages, intended by the author as reductio ad absurdum caricatures of the other side, that send the opposite message.

Wall Street was an original screen play, not an adaptation of a novel, but it provides a perfect example of a failed critique. Take, for instance, the “greed is good” speech by Stone’s character Gordon Gecko.

Sorry Mr. Stone, that had the opposite effect on me nearly forty years ago. It helped forge high school me as a young Republican.

In the book, Chrichton has a similar type of passage, but it didn’t make it into the movie. In a devil’s adocacy for biotech, the character John Hammond (the founder of the company that cloned dinasours) offers a nice jab at the Food and Drug Administration, in a John Galt sort of way:

“If you were going to start a bioengineering company, Henry, what would you do? Would you make products to help mankind, to fight illness and disease? Dear me, no. That’s a terrible idea. A very poor use of new technology.”

Hammond shook his head sadly. “Yet, you’ll remember,” he said, “the original genetic engineering companies, like Genentech and Cetus, were all started to make pharmaceuticals. New drugs for mankind. Noble, noble purpose. Unfortunately, drugs face all kinds of barriers. FDA testing alone takes five to eight years—if you’re lucky. Even worse, there are forces at work in the marketplace. Suppose you make a miracle drug for cancer or heart disease—as Genentech did. Suppose you now want to charge a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars a dose. You might imagine that is your privilege. After all, you invented the drug, you paid to develop and test it; you should be able to charge whatever you wish. But do you really think that the government will let you do that? No, Henry, they will not. Sick people aren’t going to pay a thousand dollars a dose for needed medication—they won’t be grateful, they’ll be outraged. Blue Cross isn’t going to pay it. They’ll scream highway robbery. So something will happen. Your patent application will be denied. Your permits will be delayed. Something will force you to see reason—and to sell your drug at a lower cost. From a business standpoint, that makes helping mankind a very risky business. Personally, I would never help mankind.”

That’s a jab at both political parties, and no less the one in control of today’s Department of Health and Human Services. Nothing in the life of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his left-wing tribe of environmental lawyers has benefited humanity more than the greed of big pharma.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.