- Crichton, Michael.
Next.
New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
ISBN 0-06-087298-5.
-
Several of the essays in Freeman Dyson's
The
Scientist as Rebel (June 2007) predict that
“the next Big Thing” and a central theme of
the present century will be the discovery of the fine-grained
details of biology and the emergence of technologies which
can achieve essentially anything which is possible with the
materials and processes of life. This, Dyson believes, will
have an impact on the lives of humans and the destiny of
humanity and the biosphere which dwarf those of any of the
technological revolutions of the twentieth century.
In this gripping novel, page-turner past master
(and medical doctor) Michael Crichton provides a glimpse
of a near-term future in which these technologies are
coming up to speed. It's going to be a wild and wooly
world once genes start jumping around among metazoan species
with all the promiscuity of prokaryotic party time, and Crichton
weaves this into a story which is simultaneously
entertaining, funny, and cautionary. His trademark
short chapters (averaging just a little over four pages)
are like potato chips to the reader—just one more,
you think, when you know you ought to have gotten to sleep
an hour ago.
For much of the book, the story seems like a collection of
independent short stories interleaved with one another. As
the pages dwindle, you begin to wonder, “How the heck is
he going to pull all this together?” But that's what
master story tellers do, and he succeeds delightfully.
One episode in this book describes what is perhaps the worst
backseat passenger on a road trip in all of English fiction;
you'll know what I'm talking about when you get to it. The
author has a great deal of well-deserved fun at the expense
of the legacy media: it's payback time for all of those
agenda-driven attack reviews of
State
of Fear (January 2005).
I came across two amusing typos: at the bottom of p. 184,
I'm pretty sure “A transgender higher primate”
is supposed to be “A transgenic higher primate”, and
on p. 428 in the bibliography, I'm certain that the title
of Sheldon Krimsky's book is
Science in the Private Interest, not
“Science in the Primate Interest”—what a difference
a letter can make!
In an Author's Note at the end, Crichton presents one of the most
succinct and clearly argued cases I've encountered why the patenting
of genes is not just destructive of scientific inquiry and medical
progress, but also something which even vehement supporters of
intellectual property in inventions and artistic creations can oppose
without being inconsistent.
July 2007 