Like the Kaiju Station here on Monster Island, Clonus Station was established to research effective methods of repelling alien invasions. But instead of studying giant radioactive monsters, they focused on a wide range of genetic engineering techniques, such as cloning scientists and using recombinant DNA to create dinosaur armies.
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| That one collaborative project between the Kaiju and Clonus stations in 1998 was a disaster for everyone involved. |
The most interesting thing I was able to find in the Clonus database was this file on a special breeding program the Dharma Initiative carried out in the early 1950s... 20 years before the organization was founded.
The file explains that in the 1970s, after Dharma scientists became aware of an alien invasion occurring in the United States, they quarantined themselves on an unnamed island in order to avoid contact with any extraterrestrial influence. Using the island's unique properties to travel decades into the past, they set in motion a plan to defeat the aliens before they got a stranglehold on the planet. They would create a new line of defense specially designed to protect humanity from alien invaders.
Taking DNA they'd developed specifically to produce a scientific genius, the Dharma scientists cloned seven embryos and secretly implanted them in seven different mothers. The women were selected from seven different families spread across the United States -- Bellicec, Brundle, Goldblum, Levinson, Malcolm, Ripley, and Zweibel -- in hopes that at least one of these varied homes would provide an appropriate environment for a scientifically-inclined child.
The results were, suffice to say, impressive. Three of the seven clones were instrumental in stopping alien invasions in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. Three others performed advanced scientific research leading to discoveries that Dharma was able to capitalize on in multiple Initiative projects. The seventh applied his genius to the arts, becoming a successful actor and accomplished jazz musician. As of 2012, five of the clones are still alive and well.
Clone #1: Jack Bellicec was the first person in San Francisco to discover that humans were being replaced by extraterrestrial duplicates. If not for his ultimate sacrifice, we would all be emotionless pod people now.
Clone #2: Sidney Zweibel exposed Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems, a defense contractor in Grover's Mill, NJ, as the staging area for an invasion by aliens from Planet 10, whose vanguard had been living among us since 1938.
Clone #3: Seth Brundle successfully teleporting a baboon across his lab in 1986 paved the way for Dharma's eventual teleportation of a polar bear from a tropical island to the Tunisian desert.
Clone #4: Ian Malcolm had no idea how close he was to "home" when he traveled to Isla Sorna at the request of John Hammond. Just a few islands over was Isla Matanceros, location of the Clonus Station, where his DNA was originally fabricated by scientists who later went to work for the genetics firm InGen. Malcolm may never know how much he has in common with the dinosaurs that have plagued his career.
Clone #5: The book Donald Ripley wrote about Jeremy Reed's electromagnetic mutant powers informed much of Dharma's later research on the effects of massive amounts of electromagnetic radiation on the human body.
Clone #6: Just as Sidney Zweibel realized that Orson Welles' 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast was not a hoax but a report of an actual invasion, David Levinson discovered that the 1947 Roswell incident was not merely a downed weather balloon but in fact a crashed alien spaceship. From Area 51 he was able to mastermind a counterstrike against the subsequent 1996 alien invasion that left the locust-like aliens' ships vulnerable to attack from Earth's forces.
Clone #7: Jeff Goldblum is not only one of the greatest actors of our time, but is also the man singularly responsible for society's perception of the field of science, based entirely on his perpetual portrayal of scientists throughout his long career. His greatest role was in The Race for the Double Helix in 1987, in which he portrayed James D. Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist who co-discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Ironically, the real Watson was the source of some of the DNA that Dharma scientists used to guarantee the seven clones' scientific acumen.
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