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The Science of Michael Crichton : an Unauthorized Exploration Into the Real Science Behind the Fic- Tional Worlds of Michael Crichton / Edited by Kevin R

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The Science of Michael Crichton : an Unauthorized Exploration Into the Real Science Behind the Fic- Tional Worlds of Michael Crichton / Edited by Kevin R MICHAEL CHRICHTON Other Titles in the Science of Pop Culture Series The Science of Dune: An Unauthorized Exploration into the Real Science Behind Frank Herbert’s Fictional Universe (January 2008) An Unauthorized Exploration into the Real Science Behind the Fictional Worlds of Michael Crichton MICHAEL CHRICHTON EDITED BY KEVIN R. GRAZIER, PH.D. BENBELLA BOOKS , I N C . Dallas, Texas This publication has not been prepared, approved, or licensed by any entity that created, PRO- DUCED, OR COLLABORATED ON MICHAEL CRICHTON’S BESTSELLING NOVELS. “The Andromeda Strain” © 2008 by Sergio Pistoi “Virtual Reality and Man-Machine Interface in Disclosures and The Terminal Man” © 2008 by Ray Kurzweil “Shock to the System” © 2008 by Steven Gulie “Neanderthals and Wendols” © 2008 by Ian Tattersall “Primate Behavior and Misbehavior in Michael Crichton’s Congo” © 2008 by Dario Maestripieri “We Still Can’t Clone Dinosaurs” © 2008 by Sandy Becker “Crichton Travels in Time” © 2008 by Joel Shurkin “Artificial Life in Michael Crichton’s Prey” © 2008 by Larry Yaeger “Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.: Michael Crichton’s State of Fear” © 2008 by David Lawrence “Science Comes Second in Next” © 2008 by Phillip Jones Additional Materials © 2008 by Kevin R. Grazier, Ph.D. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever with- out written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. BenBella Books, Inc. 6440 N. Central Expressway, Suite 503 Dallas, TX 75206 www.benbellabooks.com Send feedback to [email protected] Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The science of Michael Crichton : an unauthorized exploration into the real science behind the fic- tional worlds of Michael Crichton / edited by Kevin R. Grazier. p. cm. ISBN 1-933771-32-1 1. Crichton, Michael, 1942—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Science fiction, American--History and criticism. 3. Science in literature. I. Grazier, Kevin Robert, 1961– PS3553.R48Z78 2008 813'.54—dc22 2007041419 Proofreading by Emily Chauviere and PROOFREADER 2 Printed by PRINTER Cover design by Laura Watkins Cover illustration by Ralph Voltz Text design and composition by John Reinhardt Book Design Distributed by Independent Publishers Group To order call (800) 888-4741 www.ipgbook.com For special sales contact Robyn White at [email protected] CONTENTS Introduction • Kevin Grazier , Ph.D. • vii The Andromeda Strain • Sergio Pistoi • 1 Virtual Reality and Man-Machine Interface in Disclosure and The Terminal Man • Ray Kurzweil • 19 Shock to the System • Steven Gulie • 35 Neanderthals and Wendols • Ian Tattersall • 47 Primate Behavior and Misbehavior in Michael Crichton’s Congo • Dario Maestripieri • 59 We Still Can’t Clone Dinosaurs • Sandy Becker • 69 Crichton Travels in Time • Joel Shurkin • 85 Artificial Life in Michael Crichton’s Prey • Larry Yaeger • 107 Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.: Michael Crichton’s State of Fear • David M. Lawrence • 131 Science Comes Second in Next • Phill Jones • 155 INTRODUCTION ERHAPS IT IS UNBECOMING TO GUSH, but I have to admit up front that I am a huge fan of Michael Crichton’s writing and have been for most of my life. I’ve never met P the man but, then again, they say you should never meet your heroes. Like many of his readers I have been thrilled, terrified, stimulated, and certainly entertained by his novels. When a new Mi- chael Crichton novel is released, I’m the first in line. Although movie adaptations rarely do his novels justice, Andromeda Strain and Juras- sic Park still rank among my all-time favorites. Further, I would high- ly recommend any/all of the candid essays and speech transcripts on his Web site (www.michaelcrichton.com) to anybody interested in the state of science today. Many of his postings are true eye-openers, par- ticularly for the non-scientist. On the other hand having, in fact, read all the content posted on his Web site, I know that he and I would vehemently disagree on several topics—whether one of the courses I teach at UCLA, the Search for Extraterrestrial Life, is even worthy of being classified as a science class, for example. I expect he would ar- gue that my class belongs in the “Pseudo-Scientific PhilosophyC ours- es” section of the university catalog. Okay then, so maybe “hero” was a slight overstatement. Still, not only have I thoroughly enjoyed Crich- ton’s works, they’ve spoken to me in very different ways over the span of both my life and career—often in pertinent and timely fashions. In the mid 1970’s, when I was a high school student and scien- tist-wannabe growing up in the blue collar suburbs of Detroit, I dis- covered the movie—and later the book—The Andromeda Strain. That story gave me my first multiple epiphanies! For the first time in fiction I saw scientists as real, flawed, people, not simple caricatures. More- over, although I had been a science fiction fan from very early on, and as much as I credit the original Star Trek for its role in starting me on the road to a career in science, the whole Trek universe and its “can’t we all just get along” view of the future, had . sanitized . feel to it. Andromeda Strain said very clearly that, as Humans venture into space, vii THE SCIENCE OF DUNE we might encounter monsters more horrible than those with sharp teeth, acid blood, or laser blasters, and they may very well be micro- scopic. Stephen King once said, “I recognize terror as the finest emo- tion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.” Anybody who has seen a horror movie within the past three decades has witnessed all manners of gruesome and bloody dispatch. Are any of Jason’s murders truly any worse than having all the blood in your body clot over the span of a few seconds? Imagine having a massive heart attack, a massive stroke, and termi- nal atherosclerosis simultaneously. So, then, from Andromeda Strain I also learned—something the early horror author H. P. Lovecraft relied upon long ago, and what many horror writers of today seem to have forgotten—that a truly terrifying work of fiction engages in a way that makes the reader’s mind do the work, more than the mere anticipation of the “gross-out. If you took a poll among scientists, irrespective of discipline, to find what initially attracted them to science, I would bet good money that two responses would overwhelmingly outnumber all others: space and dinosaurs. I managed to squeeze in a reading of Jurassic Park during Christmas break while still a graduate student at Purdue University. Coincidentally, I had just TAed an undergraduate course on dinosaurs the previous semester. With undergraduate degrees in computer sci- ence and physics in hand, I was looking forward to a career in the Earth and planetary sciences and excited about the prospect of doing interdisciplinary research. It seemed to me at the time that real prog- ress in science is made when the techniques of multiple disciplines are brought to bear on a problem. At the same time, I was not looking for- ward to several years as a poor graduate student. Enter Jurassic Park— a multi-disciplinary mixture of supercomputing, genetic sequencing, chaos, and, yes, dinosaurs. A graduate student in the sciences must derive motivation from multiple sources, big and small, to endure the long haul. It is no exaggeration that, for me, the inherent coolness of the novel Jurassic Park, as well as the was one of many such nudges. In fact there is a well-written two-and-a-half page chapter in Jurassic Park entitled “Destroying the Planet” which I still read aloud to many of my college classes to this day. viii Introduction As a mid-career scientist, I still find Michael Crichton’s writings as pertinent to my life as ever, and find that they often echo my own sen- timents—which likely explains why I’m the first person in line at the bookstore when he writes a new novel. Putting aside, for the moment, Crichton’s specific critiques—technological and sociological—of glob- al warming (which are amply covered in this volume), State of Fear provides excellent commentary on several aspects of how unscientific the scientific process can be today. When a graduate student picks a dissertation advisor, he or she has often unknowingly made a de facto choice of sides in a scientific debate—whatever one(s) in which the advisor is embroiled. When I chose my dissertation advisor at UCLA, I was immediately enmeshed in a “Holy War” over computational techniques now used within the celestial mechanics community—a conflict that still rages, but one which Moore’s Law will ultimately decide in all likelihood. I recall one particular grant proposal rejection letter that my advisor received. He had proposed doing research using a particular methodology, but not the one “in vogue” with the bulk of the community, and rejection was filled with moread holmium attacks than scientific arguments and jus- tifications. It said, in short, “You just aren’t part of the ‘in’ crowd.” It was eye-opening disillusioning, a dose of the “real world,” and appar- ently not unusual, given Crichton’s appendix in State of Fear. In it, Crichton draws many sobering parallels between the environment that existed around the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, and that of global warming and climate change research of the early twenty-first: there is no debate here, you are to be marginalized if you aren’t part of the “in crowd.” As science advisor on Battlestar Galac- tica, I should point out that we have a saying for this, “All of this has happened before, and all of this has happened again.” Other examples of similar unscientific behavior from scientists exist: do an Internet search on the Palmdale Bulge when you have an hour or so to kill.
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