Crichton: Michael

Some imaginative writers have described scenarios in which researchers not only study the past, they recreate it. In Michael Crichton s 1990 novel Jurassic Park, scientists estabUsh a dinosaur park that resembles the Jurassic era by recreating dinosaurs based on ancient DNA sources. 

Good nontechnical, nonfiction writing can provide a model for exposition. Well-written history and biography (e.g., works by H. W. Brand, Martin Gilbert, Paul Johnson, and William Manchester) are useful for learning to handle time and sequence. Well-written popular science books and novels (e.g., by such authors as Isaac Asimov, Michael Crichton, Steven Levy, and James Gleick) are useful in learning that the presentation of factual information need not be dull. 

Probably the most famous fictional account of the gray goo problem has been Michael Crichton s 2002 novel Prey. In his book, Crichton tells of the escape of nanobots (replicators) into the surrounding environment from a research facility in the desert of Nevada. The nanobots then begin to replicate by attacking humans and other animals to extract the raw materials they need for their own reproduction. Crichton s hook was on the New York Times bestseller list for months, and in 2002 Twentieth-Century Fox purchased him rights to the story. 

State of Fear by Michael Crichton The Godfather by Mario Puzo... 

Chaos theory gained popular attention after the 1993 film adaptation of Michael Crichton s novel Jurassic Park (1990). In the film, ascientist played by Jeff Goldblum evokes chaos theory to warn that complex systems are impossible to control. 

Genetic engineering techniques could resurrect life for extinct animals, such as mammoths, or extinct human species, such as Neanderthals. Although farming DNA that is viable for such use is difficult, theoretically such feats could be accomplished. A film that was based on this possibility is Jurassic Park (1993), based on a novel of the same name hy Michael Crichton. 

Michael Crichton, (1991). Jurassic Park, London, Century -reproduced by permission of Random House)... 

Michael Crichton, from the screenplay for the movie Jurassic Park... 

Yellowstone National Park is a wonderful example of sustained well-intentioned meddling based on things which taken individually might sound reasonable, as described so eloquently by Michael Crichton (Crichton 2005). This quotation paints the background well. 

They were not only wrong, they were lamentably and persistently wrong. Yellowstone National Park was set up in 1872 as the first formal nature reserve in the world. (Note that 1 am paraphrasing here - Michael Crichton s version is far more eloquent.) In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt visited it for a dedication ceremony and noted with pleasure the abundant wild life - a thousand antelope, plentiful cougar, mountain sheep, deer, coyote, and many thousands of elk. Yet only thirty years later, the park service acknowledged that white-tailed deer, cou, lynx, wolf, and possibly wolverine and fisher are gone from the Yellowstone . What they didn t say was that they had actually caused this by well-intentioned muddled interference roughly as follows. 

This observation is echoed by Michael Crichton (Crichton 2005), who when intending to write a novel about Chernobyl and its reported 15,000-30,000 deaths with estimates of 500,000 more delayed deaths, discovered that the real figures were 56 dead and around 4,000 delayed deaths. Nobody wishes to undervalue this tragedy but the meal the media make of everything for their own ends can seriously distort the policy which then follows. 

Student Annotation In Michael Crichton s 1990 novel Jurassic Park, frog DNA was used to repair ancient dinosaur DNA to facilitate cloning of the extinct animals. In the story, the scientists believed the cloned animals could not reproduce because the population was designed to be entirely female. However, some of the dinosaurs became males—something known to occur in the frogs from which the DNA for repair had been taken—and the population of dinosaurs grew out of control. 

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