Dr. John Hammond

John Hammond is a character from Jurassic Park.

Plot in novel

It is revealed before the unveiling of Isla Nublar that Hammond was a flamboyant businessman. In 1983, he was accompanied by Donald Gennaro when displaying a baby elephant. It is revealed in the novel that Hammond is seventy-six.

He seems to find the concept of palaeontology comical, if not somewhat ridiculous. This behaviour is displayed when he begins to the laugh when he tells Gennaro that Alan Grant digs up dinosaur fossils for a living. While he doesn't seem to have a problem from the start with Grant and Elle Sattler, he does with mathematician Ian Malcolm, who 'predicts' that, because of chaos theory, Jurassic Park is bound to fail, somehow, because complex systems cannot be controlled.

It becomes clear, even before the failure, perhaps his personality results in his downfall. For instance, he completely refuses to do anything about problems with the animals, or the technical details. It appears he's been blinded by the completion of what the park, at one point saying that the fact that the genetic engineering in some dinosaurs has failed, and that the velociraptors are free in the park, is more or less a storm in a tea cup.

Even when the park does eventually fail, he stubbornly insists nothing's wrong with the park, but is forced to shelter whilst Muldoon deals with the Tyrannosaurus rex and the velociraptors that are free in the park.

At the end of the novel, whilst climbing on a hill on a swollen ankle, his head is full of plans to start again somewhere else. He trips and falls, and becomes a meal for a colony of compies.

Trivia

• The character in the film rendition of Jurassic Park is much different than the mean-spirited manager that he is depicted as in the novel. He survives in the film because he is all the wiser of everything going on in the park.