As I told you before, I was reading Michael Crichton’s Next next. Crichton is next to impossible to put down and so it was right up until his last novel. I stayed up very late racing through this book, eager to find out where he was headed this time.
Crichton’s stories are generally part action/adventure, part morality tale. Compared to the likes of Jurassic Park, Next is more the latter than the former. The story is chaotic, as half-a-dozen to a dozen tangentially-related threads weave about one another to eventually all interrelate. A grand metaphor for DNA? I’d say “almost certainly.”
Mixed into the story itself are “news articles” chronicling the media’s view of genetic research and various plot points. In interviews, Crichton said that the “science” of this story is (was, the book is from 2006) current state-of-the-art or very near future. That is, even for the wildest of the book’s speculations, he is not stretching science all that much. One wonders if the fictional news items themselves are all that fictional. Again, I’d think probably not. In its review of Next, the London-based The Sunday Times, showing a stereotypical British insightfulness, classifies the work as “more a satiric polemic than [] thriller,” which goes a long way in explaining Next‘s stylistic and structural departure from Crichton’s usual fare.
The story uses a transgenic hook, the possibility of manipulating non-human genetic code with human-specific genes, to create its thrills. What the story is about, however, is the corrupting effect of intellectual property law that allows individuals, corporations, and universities to “own” genetic sequences. A lesser theme, although I think a far more timely one for us in our present state, is the media’s misinterpretation of scientific processes and the deliberate manipulation of that ignorance by “leaders” for their own advantage.
While I was eagerly receptive to Crichton’s identification of the problem, I would diverge with him on the solution. His opinion is that some additional government regulation could solve the problem, particularly if combined with some better court decisions that prevent claimed ownership of natural processes. This is probably a lot more practical than my solution, which sees the entire morass of intellectual property law as having become a net negative to society. Crichton had repeated court cases with intellectual property law as it related to his own creative output. He may be less negative, overall, because he always managed to prevail in court.
Some combination of the novel and Crichton’s related Op-Ed in The New York Times (included in the ebook version of Next) prompted the introduction of a bill to restrict gene patents in a way similar to what Crichton called for. While legislative restrictions did not come to pass, several cases made to the Supreme Court, albeit after Crichton’s death (in 2008). The decision in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc appears to have ruled very much as Crichton advocates in his book – that the genetic code as it exists in nature is simply not patentable.
![](https://ettubluto.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/pexels-photo-4033149.jpeg)