George O. Poinar

George Poinar had the good fortune to find a way to combine his professional activity as an entomologist with his collector's interest in amber, and even turned it into an expanding family research team involving his wife Roberta — an electron microscopist — and his son Hendrik — a biochemist working on DNA amplification. In this little book he takes us quickly through the cultural history of amber as one of the earliest-known trade commodities, through the main places in the world where amber is found, and through his experiences studying organisms trapped in resin millions of years ago and extracting preserved tissue from them, which accidentally led to Michael Crichton getting the idea for Jurassic Park. Poinar is quick to reassure us that Crichton's fantasy is a long way from being realised: he doesn't think it likely that anyone will ever find a complete, undamaged piece of dinosaur DNA in a blood-sucking insect preserved in amber, and, even if they did, we'd have a hard time establishing what it really was, and an even harder one somehow simulating the environment of a dinosaur egg and persuading the blood-cell DNA to develop into a complete organism.

All the same, it's very interesting to see how much Poinar and his colleagues had learnt from organisms trapped in amber by the time this book was written (according to Wikipedia, he didn't stop there, either). Just a shame that he isn't the most gifted of writers. His thrilling or comic travellers' tales of fieldwork in rainforests and coalmines mostly fall rather flat, with a punchline that's either visible miles away or completely fails to materialise. And there's the odd way that Roberta is credited as co-author but the book is all in the first person singular, where "I"=George. Apart from a lot of very 1970s photographs of scientists standing next to rocks or trees, the book is illustrated with a section of fabulous colour images of organisms trapped in Dominican amber from around 40 million years ago, which are worth getting even if you don't bother about the text. There are no footnotes, but there is a general bibliography for each chapter in case you want to follow up the original scientific papers.… (lisätietoja)