Michael Crichton sometimes butchered the details of the science he described, but he rarely failed to convey its wonder. He built a scientific legacy that was rich, but uneven, according to scientists, some of whose research inspired Crichton's work.
Prior to his death from cancer on Tuesday, Crichton wrote or directed nine films, including *Jurassic Park *and Twister, and created the smash television hit ER. But he is best known for his 17 novels, which sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.
Before fathering the modern techno-thriller genre, Crichton graduated from Harvard Medical School, did research at the Salk Institute and tutored anthropology at Cambridge University. Accordingly, his protagonists were paleontologists and doctors and psychologists. His villains were dinosaurs and viruses and swarming nanobots.
"Crichton's Jurassic Park books were at first a kind of pain in the ass to me because people were always asking questions about whether or not you could make dinosaurs from old DNA," said Rob DeSalle, an
American Museum of Natural History geneticist and author of Science in Jurassic Park and the Lost World.
Though many of the details in his books wouldn't stand up to peer review, and he angered some scientists — particularly with his 2004 climate change broadside *State of Fear *— even Crichton's critics acknowledge the appeal of his stories and the influence they had on the public.
"I grew to really like the books," said DeSalle. "They were great devices to teach from ... any uninterested student of biology who reads the books or sees the movies, gets interested right away."
Sometimes the underpinnings of Crichton's science went unexplained. The killer plague of Andromeda Strain, for example, was a microbe without
DNA or RNA that turned matter into energy and clotted blood.
But at other times, Crichton was just wrong. Dinosaurs can't, and almost certainly won't ever, be cloned from DNA found in blood inside a mosquito trapped in amber.
(Incidentally, said DeSalle, the DNA sequence printed in The Lost World
was provided by NIH researcher Mark Boguski; translated into amino acid bases, it contained the Easter egg message "Mark Was Here NIH.")
Then there were the nanobots of Prey, which self-assembled into swarms that attacked people and took over their consciousness. Crichton's treatment of nanotech was debunked by Center for Responsible Nanotechnology co-founder Chris Phoenix. "Imagine a horror story about baseball, in which the batter keeps hitting the ball hard enough to kill the fans,"
wrote Phoenix. "The story might be entertaining, but it's obviously unrealistic."
But the science community's harshest criticisms were reserved for
Crichton's 2004 State of Fear, in which eco-terrorists keep research funding flowing by causing unnatural disasters that they blame on global warming.
In arguments later cited by such climate change denialists as Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, Crichton attacked the connection between greenhouse gas emissions and rising global temperatures — a position that was already scientific consensus, and has become an even stronger consensus since.
"Does Crichton really use the scientific method? Or is it something closer to scientific fraud?" wrote Columbia University climate researcher James Hansen.
But despite their problems, Crichton's books were sheer fun and sheerly popular. "I stand a bit in awe of the massive influence he has had on the image of science in our culture," wrote climate journalist Chris Mooney, who elsewhere savaged State of Fear, on The
Intersection. "His legacy is far bigger than this one late in life work, and whatever else you say, one has to respect and acknowledge his cultural impact."
"For all his exaggerations," said New York Medical College cell biologist Stuart Newman, whose human-animal embryo patent application is mentioned in Next, Crichton "had a good effect on the general culture that science thrives within. No one was so attuned to what could possibly go wrong."
Indeed, Ronald Bailey of Reason takes Crichton to task in his obituary for precisely that reason, criticizing him for exploiting and overhyping the ways in which science might turn on its masters. And Gavin Schmidt, Hansen's colleague at Columbia University, describes Crichton's depictions of scientists as "consistently negative, feeding the old Frankenstein stereotype updated to more modern concerns.... Given the importance of science in many of the key policy decisions that will be made in the coming years, that is very unfortunate."
But even Bailey admits that Next ends "with a vision of a happy trans-species blended family, including a multi-lingual African grey parrot and four-year old humanzee, as being pretty normal for the 21st century."
One thing is certain: Above all, Crichton's absence will be felt.
*Image: From Universal Studio's Jurassic Park ride / Scott Kinmartin *
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