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Conference on the "Legal and Social Issues in Michael Crichton's NEXT"
Chicago, IL
May 21, 2007

In late May there was a conference in Chicago on "Legal and Ethical Issues raised by Michael Crichton's 'Next.'" This was the first time there had been an academic conference on anything I have written, other than some informal hate-fests after one or another past books.

Before the conference, I decided to review what I had learned about writing on controversial subjects over the past forty years. To tell the truth, I hadn't learned much. But the first lesson, I learned very early.

Lesson 1: People Live In The Past

When The Andromeda Strain was published in 1969, it was widely perceived as "exciting and cutting-edge." But I knew that it relied on technology that was ten to twenty years out of date. I decided to write something more up-to-date.

My next novel, "The Terminal Man" in 1972, was based on a real patient who had undergone psychosurgery, had had electrodes implanted, and was being monitored by computer. I also added atomic pacemakers (then being implanted in dogs), and some then-fashionable talk about cybernetic feedback. Neurosurgeons knew very well what I was talking about, but the mass media rejected the book as "fantastic and unbelievable."

That was my first lesson: people live in the past. The world they inhabit is a world out of date. This is, I suppose, a truism. Nobody lives in the present. But for a novelist dealing with technology it means that you talk about what is actually going on at your peril. People won't believe it.

Lesson 2: News Media Presents a World Already Outdated

My next two novels were set in the past, in Victorian England and tenth-century Scandinavia. Both were cheerfully received by reviewers who found them entirely credible, even though they were in truth far more fanciful than my previous books had been.

Then, when I wrote "Congo" in 1980, considerable controversy surrounded the character of Amy, an ape that used sign language. Many reviewers rejected the idea out of hand, claiming that the notion of a talking ape was simply too ridiculous to tolerate, and destroyed any credibility for the novel. But even the few that knew there were signing apes like Koko (who had appeared on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and the National Geographic) still insisted that no ape could sign as fluently as my character did. Unfortunately for them, I used Koko's actual transcripts to form Amy's dialog in the book.

This led me to my second lesson: mainstream media commentators who profess specific knowledge also live in the past. And indeed, much of what we are exposed to in newspapers and television is outdated-structurally, conceptually, and just plain factually. The news actually presents you a world that has already vanished.

Lesson 3: There Are Some Exceptions (Engineers Are Rigorous)

In the course of my career, there have been some encouraging exceptions. Sometimes reviews have been dead on. In 1996 I wrote a novel about airplane manufacturing, "Airframe." It received technical reviews in the aerospace journals that were extremely well-informed. I'd never seen anything like it.

Reviewers accurately identified the real aircraft incidents I had fictionalized in the book: the Alaska airlines "porpoising" incident, and the China Airlines crashes. Reviewers discussed the sources of my research, naming key sources, and deducing that overall I had spent more time at McDonnell Douglas than at Boeing, which was true. In general the specificity and accuracy of the technical reviews was astounding.

Lesson 4: Scientists Seem Ignorant of History and Law

It was a different story, I am sorry to say, in the case of my newest book, "Next." Here, the expert reviewers in journals like "Science" and "Nature Biotech" have been surprising for their apparent lack of understanding. These reviewers appear unaware of the factual basis of stories in the book, even though many are lightly disguised, and quite famous in the field. As for the arguments the book makes, reviewers demonstrated lack knowledge of important studies, including those that have previously been published in the very journals that printed their review. Reviewers confused fundamental distinctions like bio and pharma, which is a little bit like confusing nuclear power and nuclear family. And they failed to grasp important issues affecting researchers and physicians. In short, they appeared not to know what I am talking about.

Usually, when a writer gets ignorant reviews, it's because the reviewer didn't read the book. But in this case, it seemed they read the book, but they were ignorant about the field. And in fact, even among scientists working in genetics and biotechnology, a detailed understanding of the contemporary interaction of science and law is often rare.

This is not healthy. The legal landscape shaping biotechnology will affect all of us at the most profound and intimate levels. We are talking about how a powerful and fast-moving technology is subjected to a system of restraints and protections that may benefit us, or even harm us. It is essential that all of us, specialists and public alike, come to grips with the issues and participate in a society-wide debate, a debate at many levels, on how we want this technology to be used.

We can't afford to live in the past. We can't afford to ignore this fast-moving field. And we can't afford to let segments of the society with religious or other agendas control how the technology is used. So I hoped the Chicago conference would be a step toward broadening a necessary discussion that we, as a society, need to hold. And I felt that it was.

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