Pre-HW Week 2 From George Church

My Homework

Prompt in Perplexity : Can you identify the ten essential amino acids in animals, and explain how this relates to your understanding of the “Lysine Contingency”?

What are the 10 essential amino acids in all animals and how does this affect your view of the “Lysine Contingency”?

There are nine universally essential amino acids for all animals, including lysine, which they must obtain from their diet since they cannot synthesize them. The “Lysine Contingency” from Jurassic Park is scientifically implausible because lysine is abundant in nature. All animals, including humans, require nine essential amino acids—histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, and valine that their bodies cannot synthesize and must obtain from food sources like meat, plants, or prey. While some species need a tenth like arginine, these nine are universal across animals for protein building and vital functions. The “Lysine Contingency” in Jurassic Park portrayed dinosaurs genetically engineered to lack lysine synthesis as a failsafe, meant to kill them by withholding the nutrient, but this is scientifically flawed since lysine is already an essential amino acid for all animals, abundantly available in nature from sources like soybeans, grains, and animal tissues. Dinosaurs could easily survive by eating wild plants or animals, rendering the contingency useless and highlighting poor genetic engineering logic in the story. This doesn’t change my view of it as entertaining but implausible fiction, real biotech safeguards would need novel dependencies, not mimicking natural nutritional limits.