A court case over whether a line of cancer-fighting cytokines belong to the patient from whom they were extracted or the doctor who's made $3 billion from them; an orangutan in Borneo that seems to speak Dutch and French; a nasty divorce that turns nastier when the wife is forced against her will to have DNA testing to prove she's a fit mother and not at risk of genetic diseases including Huntington's; an African Gray parrot that's aware of its surroundings; a mouse virus that seems to cure drug dependency, but at a price; and a verbal chimpanzee being raised in a lab combine in this novel that explores the new age of transgenics.
Crichton has been writing about cutting edge technology since his first book (written as a medical student in 1968) Five Patients about new technologies in health care. Then, as now, his writing was gripping and provocative. I've read all his novels, but after his most recent, contentious, novel, State of Fear, which carried the message that global warning's a product of fevered imaginations and political angst rather than a genuine phenomenon, I approached this novel with caution. It wasn't so much the message itself that I objected to (the minority opinion deserves a voice) as that the facts on which it was based have been fairly heavily discredited.
Next was equally polemic, but somehow more digestible - a fact I readily admit may be due to it being more in line with my beliefs. I have a medical and a health ethics background and so was already fairly conversant with many of the issues covered in this novel of the very near future, but the technical aspects are accessibly written, so this shouldn't be an issue for the lay reader. Crichton manages to bring a compelling immediacy to the issues he addresses, and I came away from this novel concerned about genetic experimentation, transgenics in particular, the slowness of the law to reflect the realities of our rapidly changing world. Which was the intent of the novel. - Alex
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