At last there came a call from the Smithsonian Institution to prepare a report on the dinosaur cloning recipe. But when the entomologists, paleontologists, and zoologists were summoned for peer review, they said they had never heard the like— and some even called it a paper fit for burning.

“Impossible,” said Pacific Tech’s Leslie Wells. “I would sooner believe the River Jordan ceased flowing for Joshua than submit to the notion that dinosaurs will ever be cloned from amber.” Stopping the River Jordan was an odd example, since it was at least possible and left her a way out. Joshua stopping the Sun would have been the example that made her position unequivocal.

“But look around you,” Tuna protested. “Look where computer and genetic technology are leading us. You’re judging this recipe from a time in which we have little more than 16K computers to work with, and in which it takes an hour to duplicate one trinucleotide sequence; but in a few years we’ll be talking about gigabytes and we’ll be watching our knowledge of genetics triple every two years. In thirty years, using nothing more exotic than off-the- shelf hardware, I’ll be able to give you the ultimate paleontological tool: the ability to study living, breathing dinosaurs face-to-face. It’s just a matter of waiting for technology to catch up with the wish, and being lucky enough to find the right fossils.”

“You must be a madman to suggest such things,” Wells said. She had then blocked publication of Tuna’s “madman recipe” everywhere except in chapters of his own book (which his granddaughter, Tam, was to take with her to Sargenti-Peterson), and in the pages of Omni magazine, where it attracted little more than yawns. As Tuna and James Powell revealed to radio talk show audiences how it might one day be possible to clone exhibits for a “dinosaur world park,” no one except science fiction writers and filmmakers were listening. But they were enough.

By the spring of 1993, three events had converged to change Wells’s mind: computer memories had swollen to gigabytes, it was possible to duplicate millions of copies from large sections of a DNA molecule in only an hour, and what had up to that time been one of Tima’s “little throwaway ideas” was suddenly writ large in what he came to call “Steven Spielberg’s little home movie about dinosaurs.”

“Who cares if it may never work,” observed one Pacific Tech scientist. “Amber studies have become the sexy science of the 1990s. It’s worth tens of millions in research grants!”

With these words, the assault against Tuna was on. The grants and the fame would go to the person who could lay claim to first articulating the idea of cloning dinosaurs. Wells was determined to lay a claim; but if she was going to succeed, she had to push Tuna out of the way. Tuna, meanwhile, had kept the letters from the Smithsonian Institution’s peer review—black-and-white proof that Leslie Wells had once been a severe critic of his dinosaur-cloning recipe—but the documents could not protect him against police reports mailed anonymously to every institution that offered him work. These reports attested that in the spring of 1968 a thirty-year-old man (occupation: teacher) by the name of Rick Tuna had been arrested for impregnating a fourteen-year-old student.