SCIENCE, CULTURED

The Crichton Effect

A Chief Designer of the Image of Science in America Passes

Anyone who ever met the late Michael Crichton—who died of cancer in Los Angeles last week at the age of 66—was first stunned by his height. Crichton stood a staggering 6′9″, and yet by all accounts was a humble giant in person. Certainly that was my impression when the polymathic sci-fi thriller writer, film producer and director, screenwriter, computer programmer, and medical doctor went out of his way to introduce himself to me at a small 2007 scientific gathering at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Whether or not he knew how critically I had written about him, I can’t say.

While Crichton may have been humble in person, the bestselling author—over 150 million total books sold—knew how to court controversy in print. Crichton’s 1992 novel Rising Sun was criticized for its perceived anti-Japanese xenophobia, and 1994’s Disclosure for wrong-headedly turning the problem of sexual harassment upside down by making a woman the aggressor. But the biggest controversy came over 2004’s State of Fear, his anti-global warming polemic, which involves environmental activists who launch a nefarious plot to make us believe climate change is real. Within the confines of the novel, it isn’t—and so the eco-terrorists go about trying to cause unnatural disasters, like blowing a chunk off Antarctica or causing a tsunami (don’t ask).

With it so close to our memories, we should address this ultra-contrarian side of Crichton first—while acknowledging that his other works, and most of all Jurassic Park, surely had a more massive cultural (if not political) impact. State of Fear brought Crichton before the U.S. Senate to testify, and even gained him an audience with President Bush. Festooned with footnotes, as many of Crichton’s books were, and centered on an anti-global warming swashbuckler of a scientist who makes the enviros look dumb intellectually while simultaneously besting the bad guys in mortal combat, the book was a climate skeptic’s dream. Yet as I wrote in The Boston Globe, many scientists cited in Crichton’s footnotes didn’t agree with his use of their work. And as I argued elsewhere, while Crichton may be God of the universe in his novels and thus capable of dictating the laws of nature, in the real world it’s clearly warming due to human activities. Since the publication of State of Fear, the evidence of this has grown stronger still.

I still remember learning, from Crichton’s novel Sphere, about the staggering intelligence of the octopus, which I found fascinating at around age twelve.

Crichton’s motivations for lending such a club to climate skeptics may not have been purely political in nature. Obviously highly intelligent and fascinated with science, he seems to have had a conviction that with his own mind and scientific training—Harvard M.D., researcher at the Salk Institute, anthropology instructor at Cambridge—he could get to the bottom of any issue on his own. Alas, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and a brilliant mind can turn very eccentric. Take Crichton’s odd argument that we should hold climate science to the standards of medical research, which features double-blind placebo controlled trials. This would of course rule out the use of computerized climate simulations, which run various scenarios about the future that are built on a large number of assumptions—but how can we conduct double-blind trials on the climate when we have only one Earth?

Leaving aside State of Fear, in remembering Crichton’s other work we must first acknowledge, with a fair amount of awe, that he was a dramatic cultural force, and a chief definer of the image of science in our culture through the medium of Hollywood. As Steven Spielberg remarked in remembrance, “He was the greatest at blending science with theatrical concepts.”

Perhaps the most common medium through which people encounter science is through science fiction entertainment, and Crichton had a unique knack for wringing drama out of the technical. Hollywood abounds in crappy sci-fi and disaster narratives—think of Volcano, in which one sprouts out of the ground under Los Angeles, or The Core, in which scientists travel to the center of the earth using a material called “Unobtainium”—but Crichton’s stories were always smarter than that, more sophisticated, filled with painstaking details and ideas that sprang from the author’s research. I still remember learning, from Crichton’s novel Sphere, about the staggering intelligence of the octopus, which I found fascinating at around age twelve.

Nowhere did Crichton better demonstrate his powers than with Jurassic Park, which grossed nearly $1 billion at the worldwide box office (although NBC’s long-running medical drama E.R., which Crichton created, has also had a dramatic influence). I recently received this film through Netflix and re-watched it, and couldn’t help noting that all the heroes in the story are scientists, and there are wonderful brainy moments—an exposition of chaos theory, a long tutorial from a cartoonish strand of DNA on how dinosaur cloning works. It was a mega-blockbuster that simultaneously managed to be quite educational.

That’s not to say everything about Jurassic Park necessarily works to the benefit of science’s place in our culture. Numerous critics, and especially Reason magazine’s Ronald Bailey, have complained that Crichton’s plotlines depend heavily on various reiterations of the Frankenstein myth. Science—whether it’s nanotechnology in Prey, or mind-control technology in The Terminal Man, or biotech in Jurassic Park—always runs amok in some way, and pretty soon there’s a body count.

Crichton apparently dismissed such concerns (so Bailey reports), which I think is unjustified. This narrative of hubristic science turning inevitably to evil has become deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness, not necessarily in a healthy way, and Crichton was a significant contributor to that. Research on the negative stereotypes of scientists held by children, who rarely see scientists as role models, makes Hollywood’s influence hard to deny. One scientist, University of Texas-Dallas physicist Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, has even found that when kids encounter real life researchers who visit their classrooms, they think someone’s pulling their leg, because the scientists aren’t anything like the big screen version. As Leslie-Pelecky explained to the magazine Nature: “They might say the person was too ‘normal’ or too good looking to be a scientist. The most heart-breaking thing is when they say, ‘I didn’t think he was real because he seemed to care about us.’” To work to achieve more positive portrayals of science, the National Academies recently launched a project called the Science and Entertainment Exchange, and I’m sure the effect of scientist-stereotypes in entertainment will be one issue they’ll consider.

But let’s let Crichton have the last word here. He engaged with criticism from the scientific community over the influence of his films, and gave a lengthy speech before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, rebutting such charges, in 1999. Crichton argued that movies simply can’t capture the reality of the intellectual process of science, because it isn’t dramatic enough: “(i) Movie characters must be compelled to act. (ii) Movies need villains. (iii) Movie searches are dull. (iv) Movies must move.” And so did Crichton, pouring out novels and films, creating an ingenious corpus that, although controversial and much criticized, has influenced us immeasurably and commands respect.

Chris Mooney is the contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Tags: Media, NAS

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