An excellent movie, no?
It dazzled the masses using technology before its time for the early 1990’s, and broadened knowledge and speculations about the possibilities or consequences of cloning. Before its successful release by director Steven Spielberg, Jurassic Park was a popular novel by one Michael Crichton. Today, theme parks around the world have dedicated portions to Michael Crichton’s beloved novel and screenplay, the story’s influence reaching as far as Poland.
So strongly connected with the world of dinosaurs, Michael Crichton had the honor of having a newly discovered fossil named after him in China in 2002, the Crichtonsaurus bohlini[1].
Michael Crichton received the proper accolades of having a fossil named in his honor and his beloved film receiving three Oscar Awards, but surprisingly, Jurassic Park did not start out as a huge success. The tale’s humble beginnings consisted of a single pterodactyl being cloned, but the plot line was not realistic enough for Crichton. Eventually, the story grew into a theme park plot, in which a young boy witnessed the havoc escaped dinosaurs could wreak on the human race. But neither the single dinosaur nor the small child’s point of view was convincing enough for Crichton’s selected proof-readers, and they hated the story. Only after he changed the story to an adult’s point of view, including the Chaos Theory of how a small disruptive event may cause a massive catastrophe, did readers and viewers alike fall in love with Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park[2].
John Michael Crichton was born in 1942 in Chicago, Illinois. He was often sick as a child, which may have been part of the reason he attended medical school and began writing medical novels. He began writing at an early age, also possibly due to his isolation from illness, and had a column in the New York Times when he was 14 years old.
Crichton had always planned on writing as a career but took a short detour to Harvard Medical School, where he continued writing, but wrote under the pen names of John Lange, Jeffrey Hudson, and Michael Douglas in order to keep anonymity. While in medical school, Crichton wrote that “We cause our diseases. We are directly responsible for any illness that happens to us,” believing that medical anomalies are a trick of the brain, a theme that reappeared throughout his medical thrillers, including A Case of Need and The Terminal Man[3]. Crichton’s aim from all of his books, whether his early books of medical mystery or the recent ones discussing technological fallacies that are being covered up, has been to inspire readers to think outside the box, while holding their attention through thrilling complex plot lines, and a “what’s next?” attitude.
Michael Crichton continued his streak of skeptical writing for a well-informed adult audience through many books, including Jurassic Park’s sequel The Lost World, as well as in Next, Timeline, Prey, and State of Fear, all addressing topics that have the possibility of unnerving today’s population. By addressing topics like cloning, time travel, nanotechnology in the military, and global warming, Crichton has established a place for himself among writers, becoming the doubting Thomas of scientific writing. His writings have spurned debate with governmental departments, placing Crichton in the thick of criticism for speaking out in opposition to the government’s disclosure of information, and leading to speeches and testimonies before the United States Senate and the like to support his opinions placed strategically in science fiction writing[4].
In Crichton’s novel State of Fear, he questions the entire theory of global warming, finding evidence that global warming is a conjecture, not a proven phenomenon. State of Fear addresses the idea that the truth about global warming is inaccessible to the public. It also connects the secrecy of a government's actions and science parading as politics to the hushed topic of eugenics, the racist scientific method for weeding out the inferior that led to the Holocaust.
In our current society, the blissfully ignorant members of the public may take what the government tells them at face value, without questioning or feeling any suspicion about unrevealed information, be it that they honestly do not want to know or that they simply do not care. The same was true in the 1940’s, at the time of the Holocaust, the public being ignorant of what was happening behind closed doors. Only once the doors of truth opened and the public of the world learned of the inhumane experiments being conducted by the Nazi Party, the mass killings of so-called inferior races in the form of Hitler's Final Solution, and the fact that they had been lied to for years did action take place to stop the horror being committed, spurning World War II, which ironically only led to more death until a peace was finally found in a very non-peaceful manner.
Crichton simply suggested that the cover up of actual or perceived knowledge about the fear-instilling topic of global warming and its consequences upon the world could very well result in a similarly chaotic event to the Holocaust, ending many lives and creating a constant state of panic. Crichton states in State of Fear, “I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed”[5]. Along with this strong accusation, Crichton has fought to prove the point that the government is wasting precious time and money trying to prevent a problem that they do not fully understand. Crichton’s philanthropic side suggested that our resources could be put to better use to solve well-defined problems in society such as starvation and disease, to which solutions are possible, but not being funded properly.
Crichton was committed, maybe overly committed at times, to his writing to the extent that he would isolate himself completely in order to give the novel his full attention, barely sleeping four hours a night, and therefore completing a draft of a novel in six or seven weeks flat. He lived an isolated life. Between Crichton’s self-inflicted work schedule, growing up in a state of perpetual illness, his multiple writing aliases, and the fact that he towered over most of the population at a height of 6’9”, it was never a problem for him to keep his life private, even when he developed throat cancer in the spring of 2008.
Michael Crichton died unexpectedly at the same time he was undergoing chemotherapy treatments on November 4, 2008, the same day Barack Obama was elected the new president of the United States[6]. Although he is no longer part of this world, Michael Crichton’s legacy lives on through his dozens of successful novels and their film adaptations, the long-running television series ER, his many speeches with government officials, and his very own dinosaur, the Crichtonsaurus bohlini. Since his passing, one of his in-the-process books, Pirates Latitude has been published, and along with Next, will eventually make it to the silver screen, further immortalizing Crichton’s influence on our culture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqgmvrL9doU&feature=related
[1] Information taken from http://www.crichton-official.com/foryoungerreaders-crichtonsaurus.html
[2] Information retrieved from http://www.crichton-official.com/books-jurassicpark.html
[3] Information and quotation taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton
[4] Information retrieved from http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches.html
[5] Quotation taken from http://www.crichton-official.com/books-stateoffear-policy.html
[6] Information obtained from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton
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