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NEXT: Another Silly Book by Crichton
You remember Michael Crichton, the author who brought us all of those 90s bestsellers later turned into blockbuster Hollywood movies? You know, Jurassic Park and its sequels, Rising Sun, Timeline, etc.
His new book, NEXT, purports to deal with the societal consequences of gene therapy and similar genetic manipulation. However, while most of his other books (with the notable exception of his previous one, State of Fear, which was a silly exercise in global warming denial, with all the eco-villians tooling about in Priuses..it was so bad, I had to stop reading it barely a quarter of the way in...) had at least enough plausibility in the human emotions to allow you to suspend your disbelief regarding the science fiction, this new book is a scattered mess with a bunch of laughable "crises" that just never gets off the ground.
For instance, one of the minor characters is charged with molestation and his attorney seriously intends to argue that the molestor is "not guilty" because of his genetic makeup. Doesn't pass the red-face test, but somehow for Chrichton--with his new found conservative bent--this ridiculous posture simply fails to register and instead becomes "scary." Similarly, at another point a doctor is confronted by his biological daughter for the first time. It turns out that the doctor is only the parent by virtue of the fact that he donated to a sperm bank decades ago and that somehow (yeah, right) his daughter--a junkie, by the way--has tracked him down via her own DNA. Despite the obvious point that it was one of her X chromasomes that came from the father and thus cannot be tracked to him definitively, as a Y chromasome could from a man or mitochondrial DNA could from a woman, the daughter somehow effectively threatens this doctor by claiming that he "should have known" that (1) he had a genetic predilection to substance abuse and (2) the fact that he should have known this and despite such knowledge contributed to a sperm bank will essentially make this doctor negligent and liable to her for damages for her own behavior as a junkie.
Perhaps the most egregious example of this type of treatment occurs when some professional bounty hunters, who work for a biotech company, decide that they will kidnap the daughter or grandchild of a man whose genes have been patented. Supposedly, some attorney offers to them the following rationale, which they bizarrely find convincing: since the biotech company has a patent on this man's genes, it therefore "owns" them and has the right to extract them from this man at any time, even against his will. But, since he cannot be found, as the agents of the biotech company, the bounty hunters can make a "citizen's arrest" of either this man's daughter or his grandchild and extract blood, liver and other tissue samples from daughter or child, against their will. Supposedly, since the daughter and grandchild have the "same" genes as the man whose genes are patented, the daughter and child are committing a continuous "felony" simply by existing and that therefore the bounty hunters could make this citizen's arrest and thereafter forcibly take the biotech firm's "property" (i.e., the blood, liver and other cells).
If you were the bounty hunter, would you even buy that for a second? If you were an attorney, would you ever give a client such advice, knowing that if you were wrong you could be found guilty of conspiracy to kidnap, assault and batter?
I didn't think so either.
As I said, just ridiculous. Really, though, despite the attenuated believability issues, structurally this book is all over the place and it goes basically nowhere. Instead, it gives Crichton a soapbox to preach about some issues that, while are important, are peripheral to the actual plot of the book. While it seems bizarre that the USPTO apparently allows patents of genes not formed by human ingenuity and there are clearly some problems with the economics of biomedical research and intellectual property, this book seriously undermines the credibility of Crichton and, sadly, the substantive arguments he hopes to make in this regard.
Just like his last book and his "arguments" regarding global warming.
Silly.