"You know the first attraction I ever built, when I came down from Scotland? It was a flea circus, Petticoat Lane."
“Quite wonderful. We had a wee trapeze, a merry-go-round- carousel- and a see-saw. They all moved, motorized of course, but people would say they could see the fleas. Oh, I can see the fleas, Mummy, can’t you see the fleas? Clown fleas and high-wire fleas and fleas on parade. But this place? I wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion. Something that was real. Something that they could see and touch. An aim not devoid of merit."
In the book, his preceding venture is described differently:
"Hammond was flamboyant, a born showman, and back in 1983 he had had an elephant that he carried around with him in a little cage. The elephant was nine inches high and a foot long, and perfectly formed, except his tusks were stunted. Hammond took the elephant with him to fund-raising meetings. Gennaro usually carried it into the room, the cage covered with a little blanket, like a tea cozy, and Hammond would give his usual speech about the prospects for developing what he called “consumer biologicals.” Then, at the dramatic moment, Hammond would whip away the blanket to reveal the elephant. And he would ask for money.
The elephant was always a rousing success; its tiny body, hardly
bigger than a cat’s, promised untold wonders to come from the
laboratory of Norman Atherton, the Stanford geneticist who was
Hammond’s partner in the new venture. But as Hammond talked about the elephant, he left a great deal unsaid.
For example, Hammond was starting a genetics company, but the tiny elephant hadn’t been made by any genetic procedure; Atherton
had simply taken a dwarf-elephant embryo and raised it in an artificial womb with hormonal modifications. That in itself was quite an achievement, but nothing like what Hammond hinted had been done.
Also, Atherton hadn’t been able to duplicate his miniature elephant, and he’d tried. For one thing, everybody who saw the elephant wanted one. Then, too, the elephant was prone to colds, particularly during winter. The sneezes coming through the little trunk filled Hammond with dread. And sometimes the elephant would get his tusks stuck between the bars of the cage and snort irritably as he tried to get free; sometimes he got infections around the tusk line. Hammond always fretted that his elephant would die before Atherton could grow a replacement.
Hammond also concealed from prospective investors the fact that the elephant’s behavior had changed substantially in the process of
miniaturization. The little creature might look like an elephant, but he
acted like a vicious rodent, quick-moving and mean-tempered. Hammond discouraged people from petting the elephant, to avoid
nipped fingers. And although Hammond spoke confidently of seven billion dollars in annual revenues by 1993, his project was intensely speculative. Hammond had vision and enthusiasm, but there was no certainty that his plan would work at all."
Basically, the tl;dr is that I'm saying that like John Hammond, this company is making promises they can't keep based on science they aren't doing, and the public is lapping it up because they want to believe. They want to see the fleas, even when the fleas aren't there to be seen.
