Next,
by Michael Crichton
(HarperCollins, 448 pp., $27.95) |
Bio Hazard
RONALD BAILEY
In reviewing Next, Michael Crichton’s new novel of the biotech future, I have to begin with a disclosure. Crichton now footnotes his novels, and in the endnotes to this one he cites my book Liberation Biology — which he praises as “the clearest and most complete response to religious objections to biotechnology.”
I can’t be quite as full-throated in praise of Next, a sprawling, ungainly narrative mess of a techno-thriller. In typical Crichton fashion, the author interweaves a lot of fast-paced plots, some of which get lost without a trace. But you either like novels that read like proto–movie scripts with barely sketched-out characters and fast action, or you don’t. Generally I do.
Crichton has had great success with the well-worn formula pioneered by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein: Scientific hubris leads to disaster. In The Andromeda Strain (1969), Army scientists in search of biological-warfare agents endanger humanity by bringing back a space virus that infects a town. In The Terminal Man (1972), the epileptic protagonist goes on a murderous rampage under the influence of computerized mind control. Crichton makes the Frankenstein-reanimation theme even more explicit in Jurassic Park (1990), in which a paleontologist uses biotechnology to bring dinosaurs back to life.
Frankensteinian concerns persist in the modern age because of humanity’s inborn suspicion of the new. Happily, over the past few centuries the West has established firm linkages between scientific and economic actors — launching the industrial/technological revolution that has lifted billions of people out of humanity’s natural state of abject poverty. But such transformations of economic and social institutions remain scary. Frankenstein was essentially a reactionary response to that revolution. But there are other ways to craft narratives about humanity’s growing technological prowess — telling stories that are more hopeful and liberating.
For example, I have often wanted to suggest to Crichton that he could have gotten the same narrative bang for his buck if he had instead celebrated the achievement of bringing dinosaurs back to life. In my alternative plot, a kindly old paleontologist, using the miracle of biotechnology, conjures dinosaurs back into existence to delight the world’s children. Things go wrong only when a cadre of evil anti-biotechnologists led by Jeremy Rifkin break into the peaceful island zoo to kill the dinosaurs. This revised scenario would provide Crichton with all of the gunfire, gore, chase scenes, and satisfying explosions without the Luddite baggage of the original.
This plot would actually be more true to life — because there is practically no evidence that humanity rushes headlong into misusing powerful new technologies. Instead of using computerized probes for mind control, physicians implant them to control Parkinson’s disease. Instead of carelessly bringing space viruses to Earth, NASA set up elaborate containment and decontamination systems for astronauts returning from the moon. And researchers hope to use biotech to bring back to life animals driven to extinction by humanity, including the Tasmanian tiger and the woolly mammoth.
Crichton’s most recent Luddite book was the anti-nanotech tale Prey (2002): The villains are swarms of nanoparticles, molecular machines measuring only billionths of a meter. Manufactured by a greedy and careless corporation, escaped nano-swarms feed on animals and human flesh. More recently, in State of Fear (2004), Crichton took a different turn: Instead of fanning technological fears, he condemned the hubris of people who think they know best how others should live. Instead of evil corporations deploying technology to imperil the world, he showed us villainous green radicals subverting science to frighten humanity into a drastic left-wing reorganization of society.
State of Fear was actually the novelization of a speech Crichton delivered in 2003, arguing that environmentalism is essentially a religion: a belief system based on faith, not fact. In State of Fear, activists plot to manufacture events — crumbling Antarctic ice shelves and Pacific tsunamis — that would be interpreted as evidence for imminent, catastrophic global warming. The idea is that donors, frightened by these events, would begin shoveling cash into activists’ coffers, and policymakers would begin to heed them. Although the plot was as movie-ready as that of any other Crichton novel, he later said that the book was never optioned in Hollywood because it was “way too red hot.”
State of Fear not only became a bestseller, but propelled its author into public-policy circles. Crichton was invited to make speeches around the country on science policy; in 2005 he even testified in front of a Senate committee about the politicization of climate-change science.
In Next, Crichton returns to his trope that corporations are wicked, but manages nonetheless to portray some of the researchers as good guys. The novel opens with a typically Crichtonesque scene in which a post-doc who is apparently trying to peddle some stolen genetically modified human embryos gruesomely commits suicide in a glittery Las Vegas hotel. It turns out that this scene is a throwaway; the subplot gets dropped without explanation, one of the book’s several dead-ends.
After this puzzling opening, Crichton starts weaving together various subplots that highlight aspects of where biotechnological research might take us. Some of his plot lines are taken from real life: In one of them, Frank Burnet is suing UCLA and the biotech startup BioGen Research Inc. for turning cells taken from his body during leukemia treatment into a lucrative biotech product line worth billions.
Crichton is basically repackaging here the actual case of Moore v. Regents of the University of California. In 1976, UCLA physician-researcher David Golde treated John Moore for hairy-cell leukemia by removing his spleen. A normal spleen weighs about a pound; Moore’s was 22 pounds. Golde managed to transform cells taken from Moore into a cell line that produced medically valuable proteins. UCLA patented the cell line and reached a lucrative agreement with a biotech company for their further development. For seven years, Moore traveled several times a year to Golde’s lab where further blood, bone marrow, and other substances were withdrawn from his body. In 1984, Moore sued; in 1990, the California supreme court ruled that his cells, once removed from his body, were not his property since they were mere medical waste.
Early on in Next, a court similarly rules that Burnet does not own his own cells. Unfortunately, however, the cell lines derived from Burnet and now growing in BioGen’s labs have been contaminated. Investments worth billions will be lost unless the cells are replaced from the only known sources — Burnet, his daughter, and his grandson. Given that this is a Crichton novel, the corporation is not overly sensitive about how it replaces what its executives regard as its property.
Crichton similarly fictionalizes reality in a subplot in which shady characters in a pathology lab harvest and sell tissue and bones from cadavers without consent. This sordid activity came to light in real life in 2005, when police discovered that bones were taken from the cancerous cadaver of 95-year-old BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke and sold.
Crichton explores more futuristic aspects of biotechnology as well. In another story line, tourists discover an orangutan in the wilds of Sumatra that fluently curses them in Dutch, French, and English. The only apparent purpose of this plot thread is to permit scenes in which newspaper reports of this discovery upset kindhearted primate researcher Henry Kendall. We learn that Kendall had done work at a National Institutes of Health chimp lab four years earlier. He now wonders whether Dutch scientists hidden in Sumatran jungles have somehow succeeded in creating a transgenic ape using human genes. Kendall shortly afterwards receives a mysterious summons to NIH, where he is told that a forgotten experiment has had an inadvertent and unexpected outcome — a four-year-old transgenic talking chimpanzee named Dave. The NIH lab honchos want to cover up the mistake by quietly euthanizing the chimp. Kendall won’t stand for this; he sneaks Dave out of the lab and takes him home.
Meanwhile, in Paris, other biotech researchers are injecting African grey parrot chicks with human transgenes. One of the researchers, Gail Bond, had taken a parrot named Gerard home to live with her family. Bond is very excited when she discovers that Gerard has been surreptitiously helping her 6-year-old son with his math homework. Very quickly, though, Gerard’s wicked sense of humor and demands for attention get him into trouble with Bond’s husband — who sees to it that Gerard disappears. After a series of hair-raising adventures, the multilingual parrot eventually ends up in California.
The adventures of the transgenic chimp and parrot are the most thought-provoking and fun parts of the novel. Unlike Frankenstein’s “monster,” these two are wholly admirable individuals — brave, loyal, and honest. I take it that when Kendall rescues Dave from death by morphine drip at NIH, the point Crichton is making is that if a creature can talk and tell us how it wants to be treated, we should listen. The capabilities of such beings may be limited, so our mutual moral obligations may be more like those of a parent to a very young child, but moral respect must be given. In stark contrast to Victor Frankenstein, primate researcher Kendall steps up and takes responsibility for the being he has inadvertently created. Crichton ends with a vision of a happy trans-species blended family as being pretty normal for the 21st century.
Despite its considerable narrative flaws, Next is still a compulsively readable beach book about the dawn of the biotech revolution. If your taste runs to car and helicopter chases, gunfire, explosions, sex, and entertaining demises for villains, combined with a bit of public policy, Next delivers all that and more. So squirrel away this one in your luggage when you fly to some sandy strand for your winter vacation.
Mr. Bailey, Reason magazine’s science correspondent, is author of Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution.
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