“Welcome to our genetic World. Fast, furious and out of control. This is not the world of the future—it’s the world right now.”
Next is a fantastic book to end Michael Crichton reign with the pen and a great way to hang up his writing gloves. I will surely miss his penmanship style as well as his directing style. He has written such masterpieces as Jurassic Park and The Lost World which were made into movies with Disclosure and Eaters of The Dead as well as Andromeda Strain. Most if not all of the stories he’s written has made it into movies.
NEXT, the last book he wrote, with such an appropriate title, was about the Genetic World, and what is happening and also what will happen if we are not careful and cautious. In almost all of his books, they were in some way having to do with a laboratory or scientific center which is probably because he was a medical student in his youth.
The book, as most of his books started off with some quotations from famous scientist. One quote that has started this story masterfully is
“The more the universe seems comprehensible the more it also seems pointless.”
To me this means, the more we pay attention to the little details, the interest that the larger picture has for us dwindles. This describes all life in a way, the more you fidget with the little things the pointlessness of reality takes hold, for instance, in a puzzle, when you work on a particular section you can’t really see the whole picture, until you are finished with the whole layout and all. However sometimes you cannot figure the whole picture if you have not done the most in creating the details to the best of your knowledge.
The story starts out with the discovery of the novelty gene, D4DR, which is in charge of thrill seeking behaviors. It also makes reference to some of the chimp man experiments that were conducted under Stalin and Hitler. Then the story continues to a scientific conference called Make it happen Now! Where it turns mysterious, in the fact that we are involved in a family squabble dealing with a father’s death and we are asked to find the culprits using DNA and Placebo test.
It then switches to the interaction of a chimp boy at a school and how he gets terrorized by the students. The chimp boy was being home schooled which was all fine, but he went to school one day, and ended up biting another boy or being accused of that. His surrogate mother was called and he was removed. That however doesn’t solve the issue of terror of the chimp boy.
When introducing two new species to each other it is very difficult. The tensions increase when one thing is new and the other is in the natural environment of its existence. So you cannot really force familiar relations you have to let them occur spontaneously. if and when they occur spontaneously they have a greater probability of success. After all aren’t familiar relations a spontaneous response to begin with. How can you constrict as well as organize an already spontaneous response
