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The sad news this week of the death of Michael Crichton at the early age of 66 had me doing the usual online reflection, reading the obituaries and looking for recent interviews. Crichton is an author I’ve read only in small quantities but, more than that, I recognize that he’s a thinker whose ideas have filtered into our mainstream culture in a big way — with bestsellers turned into films like The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park he has tapped into and translated some of the big ideas in science fiction for a broad audience.
This hour interview with him from Charlie Rose is around a year old, and coincides with the release of his novel Next, about the human genome. An interesting and free-ranging discussion touching on the legal and ethical ramifications of gene sequencing, nature vs. nurture, disease patents, and stem cell research. Crichton is refreshingly conservative about his projections for the near-term ‘biotech revolution,’ saying that the notion that we will have designer babies and immortal humans in the next hundred years is unrealistic; that it is, in fact, ‘phenomenal science fiction.’
Crichton’s novel State of Fear generated a lot of controversy as, in it, he looks at global warming dispassionately and comes to different conclusions from the consensus view. I won’t go into here, as this interview address his actual view quite well (which is far more nuanced than his strident denouncers ever allowed), but I find his sober appraisal and insistence on relying solely on facts far more conducive to actual discussion than the chiliastic catastrophe prophecies of many of the enviro-hustlers and prophets that seem to be getting all the air time on this issue. Crichton’s most cogent warning is that ‘the movement’ must not be allowed to take over the science, and that approaching the issue from an emotional rather than rational point of view will impede progress.
And, incidentally, Crichton does refer to himself as a science fiction writer in this interview, for those of you wondering if he held himself aloof from the ‘ghetto.’
An interesting interview, one of many that go back over a decade of talks between Rose and Crichton, several more of which are available on you tube from Charlie Rose.
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