Exploring Michael Crichton and His Impact on Public Perceptions of Science

Joanna Radin, PhD: It started when I was 10 years old, in 1990, the year I was accepted into a DNA Camp at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 15 minutes away from where I grew up on Long Island. This was a program that was subsidized for girls and underrepresented minorities to spark interest in the future of genomics.

A few years later, when I was 13, Jurassic Park came out. It was one of the first movies I saw in the theater without parental supervision, and it blew me away—not because I was seeing dinosaurs and I was scared, but because I found it to be plausible. I was perhaps at the exact right age to connect the dots and say, “Hmm, is this the future they were talking about at DNA camp?” When I went home, I found the book Jurassic Park and all these other Crichton books that my dad, an elementary school teacher, had been reading.

Reading Michael Crichton at that age made me feel smart and grown up. As I wrote in a recent essay, I started to ask questions that I would carry with me: Who is making decisions about science? Who's keeping us safe? Who is watching the people who are creating these innovations? What would it mean for me to become part of this world?

In Jurassic Park, the paleobotanist Ellie Satler is one of the few women scientists depicted in Hollywood in a positive light. And Lex, the little girl, was close to my age. In the movie, she's a hacker who knows her way around the computer. She kind of saves the day. I was looking at this little girl and thinking, is this a role model for me? I forgot about her until I was working on my dissertation. I started to wonder about who Lex might have become as an adult.

Radin: One thing the book is not is a biography of Crichton. In many ways, it is an effort to make sense of my own relationship to science. But it will use his career and life as a framework for examining the conversation about science in America during a period when life itself was being radically reconfigured. It starts in the 1940s—he was born in 1942, the year the Manhattan Project began to create the first atomic bombs. It’s really once the bomb is dropped that people get serious about what all this radiation is going to mean for life on earth. That was followed by an intensification of research in genetics, and a shift from warfare to welfare with the creation and rise of the National Institutes of Health, and unprecedented amounts of money flowing into biomedical research.

The transformation of medical science during that period spans the development of the polio vaccine, tissue culture and immortal human cell lines, and later advances such as genome sequencing and molecular technologies. Crichton recognized the power of using entertainment to explore scientists’ own fears about these transformations.

Radin: The last third of the book traces the ways in which he became an increasingly controversial figure due to his depictions of women, race, and environmentalism. He drew accusations of sexism from his depiction of a woman as a sexual harasser in Disclosure, and of racism after some people took offense at his depiction of Japanese people in his book Rising Sun. Toward the end of his life, his novel State of Fear led him to be cast as a climate-denier.

Crichton’s interests in parapsychology and human potential, practices often dismissed as pseudoscience, have become important to me for making sense of how he reckoned with his own spiritual needs. He was very into computers, but not merely as calculating machines. The first computer program he wrote simulated the I Ching, the Chinese practice of divination that involves tossing coins.

I want to reframe the narrative that he was a genius who predicted things—he was very adamant that anyone who thinks they can see the future is not to be trusted. However, he was someone who was interested in how prediction, culture, and belief work. He leveraged those interests to show how wonder and fear work together to generate meaning. And even as I despair about his politics, it's hard to overstate his influence. There are universities that started their molecular biology departments after Jurassic Park came out. There is a whole generation from which people went into medicine because they watched ER.

When I talk to people about how to relate to emerging technology, they sometimes—without even realizing what the source was—respond with that famous remark from chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm, played by the actor Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” The question I am preoccupied with is this: In supposedly secular realms who and what informs that idea of “should”?

Radin: Michael Crichton was once described as the doctor who operates in the realm of imagination. He devoted himself to telling stories about science across nearly every form of mass media available to him in the late 20th century: publishing, movies, television, and even video games. It matters to me that he figured out how to broadcast his messages in ways that overshadowed competing perspectives.

As mass media audiences have fractured in the 21st century with the rise of the internet and social media, the hope is not to insist on blind trust in science. We need to acknowledge the harms that have occurred in biomedicine, for instance, those who have been exploited but remain disenfranchised from its benefits. I care about how people are seeking wellbeing and medical care. I also want to create a wider frame of understanding of our moment so that we don't have to settle for the narrowness of left-versus-right arguments.

Radin: He’d surely be part of the conversation about artificial intelligence (AI). In 1970 he was on The Dick Cavett Show talking about ELIZA, an early psychotherapy bot. And in The Andromeda Strain, he's concerned about the de-skilling of doctors in the age of computers, which poses an existential threat to the profession today.

The question is, would he be talking about AI from the vantage point of Silicon Valley? He thrived on being a contrarian, so I find it more likely that he would find a different place to stand and speak critically.

Radin: I hope they recognize that science can reveal powerful realities, but the meanings behind those realities are up for grabs. In other words, I want them to pay attention to the values and motivations they bring to their work, their sense of the “should.” What assumptions animate their understanding of what it means to be virtuous, to deploy science in the name of the good? I also want them to think more carefully about the role of corporate interests, as Crichton always did. I encourage my students to examine the difficult feelings aroused by their ambitions. I want them to seek stories that help them feel less alone and to inspire them to reclaim a sense of agency in a world that lately reminds me too much of a Michael Crichton tale.