The Science of Michael Crichton: An Unauthorized Exploration into the Real Science Behind the Fictional Worlds of Michael Crichton
173
The Science of Michael Crichton: An Unauthorized Exploration into the Real Science Behind the Fictional Worlds of Michael Crichton
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Overview
The Science of Michael Crichton examines the amazing inventions of Crichton's books and lifts up the hood, revealing the science underneath.
In intelligent and well-thought essays, scholars and experts decide what Crichton gets right and what he gets wrong. They examine which Crichton imaginings are feasible and which are just plain impossible. Scenarios examined include whether dinosaurs can be cloned, if nanotechnological particles can evolve intelligence, and if we can go back in time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781933771328 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BenBella Books, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/09/2008 |
| Series: | Science of Pop Culture Series |
| Pages: | 173 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.45(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN
SERGIO PISTOI
On 28 September 1969 the Murchison meteorite fell in Victoria, Australia. Within that meteorite were compounds related to sugars, and more than seventy amino acids — the building blocks of earthly life — fifty of which are not present on Earth. On the Space Shuttle Atlantis mission STS-115, twenty-seven years later, Salmonella typhimurium bacteria showed a dramatic increase in virulence as a result of space fight. Sergio Pistoi, Ph.D., examines The Andromeda Strain which, suddenly, seems really quite plausible.
This book recounts the five-day history of a major American scientific crisis.
As in most crises, the events surrounding the Andromeda Strain were a compound of foresight and foolishness, innocence and ignorance. Nearly everyone involved had moments of great brilliance, and moments of unaccountable stupidity.
— MICHAEL CRICHTON, foreword to The Andromeda Strain
LATE 1960s. A secret military satellite, sent into deep space by the army to look for new forms of life, crashes near a small village in Arizona, spreading a mysterious and deadly extraterrestrial organism. People coming into contact with the organism die instantly, because the bug causes all their blood to clot solid. It's something nobody has ever seen on Earth. Something that could potentially destroy humanity if it spread.
The Andromeda Strain recounts the drama of four scientists fighting against that lethal creature from space. Researchers start by exploring the village and by collecting samples of the mysterious organism, while the army isolates the area. They still have no idea of what they are facing, and they don't know how to stop that deadly invasion. But they have found two survivors — an old, alcohol-addicted man and an always-crying newborn baby. Whatever the old man and the baby have in common, it must hold the key to understanding how the deadly organism works and how it can be stopped.
Michael Crichton published The Andromeda Strain in 1969, when he was still a graduate student at the Harvard Medical School. It was his first bestseller, making him known worldwide as an emerging literary star. The story has all the ingredients of a great bio-thriller, and at the same time reflects Crichton's medical and scientific background and his ability to mix real science with creative, but plausible fiction. Crichton wrote the novel in a false-document style, mixing references to real scientific publications and to fictional "classified" documents, like he was recounting real events. Also, the portraits of researchers are quite realistic in the way they collect data about the organism (codenamed Andromeda, hence the title) and use scientific knowledge and intuition to formulate hypotheses about its nature. It's also interesting that, apart from the inevitable science fiction touch, much of the equipment and methods described in the book reflects the best technology available during the 1960s.
Consistently with its extraterrestrial nature, Andromeda is astonishingly different from any known form of life; it has no proteins, no DNA, and none of the other building blocks that are typical of terrestrial organisms. Surprisingly, it has the structure of a crystal, something that we associate with inorganic objects such as minerals, not with a living organism. If judged with terrestrial criteria, Andromeda cannot be living. Still, it behaves like a living organism: it is able to reproduce and to infect its victims and, as it will turn out later in the story, it can mutate very rapidly, adapting to its environment.
How plausible is this scenario? Based on scientific evidence, can we imagine alien organisms like Andromeda, so far from our idea of life? if so, how could we protect the Earth from the invasion of alien pests? As weird as they sound, these questions are not just science fiction buffs' speculations, but also the subject of many serious and fascinating scientific investigations. But first of all, before you laugh at the idea of a living crystal, ask yourself a question: What do you exactly mean by "life"?
A MATTER OF TASTE
Surprisingly, a simple question like "What is a living organism?" has no clear-cut answer. All attempts to scientifically define what is and isn't alive have failed miserably. Of course, we can list some features that are closely associated with life: living organisms are able to reproduce, passing their genes to their offspring; they constantly maintain their internal equilibrium, even when their environment changes (a property that biologists call homeostasis); and they have a metabolism that allows them to transform and store energy. However, none of these features alone can define life beyond reasonable doubt. For example, not all the individuals of a species reproduce. I don't have children, but I was alive last time I checked. On the other hand, many objects are capable of homeostasis and are able to transform energy. Imagine what would happen if an alien landed on a farm while looking for signs of life on Earth and found only a refrigerator and a bag of seeds. Which of the two would look more "alive"? A refrigerator is capable of homeostasis (because its thermostat actively maintains a constant internal temperature and humidity) and it transforms energy, while the seeds are as inert as stones. You could argue that a refrigerator does not reproduce, but neither do the seeds in the bag, unless they are planted and kept in the right conditions to germinate. In terms of pure evidence, and according to our criteria, the alien would understandably dismiss the seeds as objects, asking to be taken to the refrigerator's leader instead.
But we all know that the seeds, not the refrigerator, are the living stuff in the room. So where's the catch? There is no catch. We can tell that the seeds are living organisms because we know they are part of a biological cycle: although they look inanimate, we know that they have a potential to germinate, giving rise to a plant. Likewise, we say that a refrigerator is not an organism because we know it is a human artifact without any life on its own and without a potential to reproduce. In other words, we cannot define life a priori, but we can recognize it based on what we know about life on Earth.
Our definition of life is so blurred that, eighty years after their discovery, scientists are still debating whether viruses can be considered alive or not. Strictly speaking, viruses are unable to meet the minimum requirements by which we define life: they are sorts of genomic capsules made of proteins and containing a payload of DNA or RNA. Since they cannot read and copy their own genome, like malicious software viruses they must infect other cells and harness their machineries to produce new viral copies that, in turn, infect other cells. Because of that, viruses are molecular parasites without life on their own, living a "borrowed life" inside other organisms. Are they alive or not? Back in 1962, the French Nobel prize laureate André Lwoff put the question in very frank terms: "Whether [viruses] should be regarded as living organisms is a matter of taste," he wrote. His famous quote is still very valuable today.
If simple, terrestrial organisms like viruses already are a challenge to our concept of life, how could we recognize alien organisms based upon a different biology than ours if they existed in another planet? it's not a simple question. One problem is that we are so accustomed to our biology that we can hardly conceive a different one. Terrestrial life is like a set of Lego toys: with only a small set of building blocks and a few, simple rules, evolution has given rise to an infinite variety of shapes, species, and functions. From a coliform bacterium to Angelina Jolie, the basic chemical recipe is the same: four elements — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen (the so-called CHON group) — make up 99 percent of the mass of every living creature, while thousands of other elements, including calcium, phosphor, and sulfur, account for the remaining 1 percent. Carbon provides the backbone of all organic molecules and is therefore the basis for the chemistry of life on our planet. In cells, carbon atoms are combined with the other elements to form organic molecules such as amino acids, sugars, fats, and nucleotides, which, at their turn, are the building blocks of bigger molecules such as proteins, DNA, or cellular membranes. Water, which is abundant on Earth, provides the solvent and the chemical environment for all biological reactions. The beauty of the system is that, just like a set of Lego toys, the building blocks are essentially the same for all creatures: by combining, in different ways, twenty amino acids, five nucleotides, and a handful of other molecules, you can obtain every organism on Earth, whether it is a bacterium, a banana, or your neighbor. This scheme works well for our planet; however, astrobiologists warn that it's just one of the many possibilities by which life could have evolved in the universe. On another planet, biology could follow a completely different paradigm, for example, by using a different set of building blocks and different rules for their assembly.
A CRYSTALLINE LIFESTYLE
Even using very loose criteria to define life, it's hard to imagine how a crystal, like the Andromeda strain, could behave as a living organism. A crystal is almost the nemesis of our idea of life: a fixed, dry structure, with few or no possibilities of dynamic changes. Take, for example, the crystalline form of carbon (in the "chair" hexagonal structure, better known as a diamond). Girls' best friend is a regular network of carbon atoms kept together by sturdy chemical links: they are beautiful and incredibly solid, but, chemically speaking, they are a death valley with no or few possibilities for reactions. Under these conditions, how could a crystal live?
Surprisingly, although there is no evidence of them on this planet or elsewhere in space, the existence of crystalline organisms is not just a science fiction's expedient, but a possibility that some researchers have seriously considered. One of them is Scottish biologist Alexander cairns-Smith, the author of the popular and controversial book Seven Clues to the Origins of Life, who suggested in the 1960s that crystals, and not organic molecules, were the earliest forms of life on Earth. His theory was based on some interesting features of crystals: they are able to grow (you probably enjoyed the beauty of growing crystals during your school science classes), and, what is intriguing, when two pieces of crystal come apart and grow further, they maintain their shape, mimicking a sort of reproduction. Besides, many minerals are good catalysts for biological reactions. Cairns-Smith postulated that crystals would have been good candidates as primitive forms of "life" that could have later evolved into more complex organisms because of these and other properties. According to his "genetic takeover" model, inorganic crystals (probably clays) provided the first self-replicating and evolving entities on Earth and only later in evolution did RNA and DNA take over as a more efficient hereditary material for living organisms. Like other theories about the origin of life, cairns-Smith's model is difficult to prove and has its share of enthusiasts and critics. Although bizarre, the idea is neither more nor less plausible than others: the origin of life is another field where choosing among different explanations is still largely a matter of taste. The Scottish scientist, however, is not alone in believing that a non-chemical life could be possible. In 1976, French astronomer Jean Schneider wrote a scientific paper proposing that non-chemical, crystalline life would be possible, at least in theory. His model of "crystalline physiology," as he called it, was based on the existence of tiny defects, or interruptions, in the regular atomic structure of the crystal, called dislocations. You can think of them as cracks on a glass windshield. The analogy may not be very accurate, but it is useful to visualize Schneider's theory. Vibrations make the cracks slowly propagate along the windshield and when two of them intersect, they produce new patterns. Likewise, dislocations in a crystal propagate and interact, producing new dislocations with mathematically predictable patterns, mimicking a simple reaction. Like a crack on a glass, every dislocation has a unique shape, which you can see as a form of information, like a drawing. When a crystal grows and comes apart, dislocations are passed to the "daughter" crystals, a bit like genetic information. Schneider speculated therefore that dislocations could work as a primitive "central memory"; the equivalent of DNA in a hypothetical crystal world. Since solid crystals don't move, the French astronomer also suggested that liquid crystals, which flow like a liquid, but have atoms arranged in a crystal-like way, would be a more likely candidate for life.
Whether or not you believe in the hypothesis of a crystal ancestor, cairns-Smith's theory offers a great opportunity to speculate about the origin of the Andromeda strain. The oldest fossils found so far are about 3.5 billion years old; therefore, if cairns-Smith were right, life as we know it today should have evolved from crystalline "organisms" sometime between 3.9 and 4.1 billion years ago. Since we haven't found any crystalline organism on Earth, we can assume that carbon-based organisms outperformed crystal species so well that all living crystals, if they ever existed, are now extinguished. However, moving back into the world of Michael Crichton, we can think of another fascinating possibility: imagine for a moment that crystalline life did not extinguish, but instead, in a remote and inaccessible part of the world, evolution continued to produce more and more sophisticated crystalline species and Andromeda was one of them. Instead of a space bug, Andromeda could be a far relative of ours, a descendant of the early crystalline forms of life on Earth, a living fossil of a forgotten branch of evolution that stuck with crystalline, rather than carbon, organization. I like to think that Crichton would have mentioned this possibility in his book, had he been aware of cairns-Smith's work. He probably missed that chance by a hairsbreadth: cairns- Smith wrote his first paper on the subject in 1966, only three years before The Andromeda Strain was published. Unfortunately, it was just a minor article in an obscure scientific journal that went overlooked for many years.
LOOK, NO ENZYMES!
If we have to imagine a hypothetical world populated by crystal creatures, we must explain how they would be able to use and transform energy to grow, to build their components, and to maintain their homeostatic balance. In our biology, these activities depend on a series of chemical processes, which are known collectively by the name of metabolism. Catabolic and anabolic reactions are the yin and yang of metabolism: the former produce energy by breaking down nutrients, while the latter use energy to build all the cell's components. You can think of the cell as a factory where chemical reactions are organized into assembly and disassembly lines that biologists call pathways. Catabolic pathways are organized as a series of disassembly lines in which energy-rich carbon compounds, typically sugars and fats, are broken down to produce energy. The most familiar catabolic activity is respiration, in which cells break down nutrients into water and carbon dioxide, which, in vertebrates, is eventually expelled from the lungs or the gills.
Anabolic pathways, instead, are assembly lines where all the various building blocks are synthesized and rearranged to produce DNA, proteins, membranes, and all the components of a cell, and to build up storage, mainly in the form of long chains of sugars or fat.
If the cell is a chemical factory, enzymes are the workers that make everything happen. Our genome codes for thousands of enzymes, each specializing in one step of a pathway, like workers on a chain line. Enzymes are proteins that catalyze (i.e., accelerate) chemical reactions. Without them, the whole cell would be blocked like a factory in the middle of a strike. Metabolic diseases are a dramatic example of the importance of enzymes. In these disorders, a single, faulty enzyme can block an entire pathway, depriving the organism of essential components, while unfinished building blocks accumulating engulfing the cells and leading to severe symptoms or death.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Science of Michael Crichton"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Kevin R. Grazier, Ph.D..
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION,
THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN,
VIRTUAL REALITY AND MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE IN DISCLOSURE AND THE TERMINAL MAN,
SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM,
NEANDERTHALS AND WENDOLS,
PRIMATE BEHAVIOR AND MISBEHAVIOR IN MICHAEL CRICHTON'S CONGO,
WE STILL CAN'T CLONE DINOSAURS,
CRICHTON TRAVELS IN TIME,
ARTIFICIAL LIFE IN MICHAEL CRICHTON'S PREY,
BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID: MICHAEL CRICHTON'S STATE OF FEAR,
SCIENCE COMES SECOND IN NEXT,