Michael Crichton overleden

Afgelopen dinsdag, 4 november, is niet alleen Barack Obama gekozen tot nieuwe president van de VS, maar ook Michael Crichton overleden. Crichton werd 66 jaar. Veel mensen zullen hem kennen als de schrijver en producer van de langlopende bekroonde ziekenhuisserie 'ER', waarin bijvoorbeeld George Clooney echt doorbrak. Hij was echter ook de auteur van een hele reeks boeken waarin bijvoorbeeld biologie, genomics en nanotechnologie een centrale rol hadden. Echt beroemd is hij geworden door de verfilming van Jurassic Park. In deze film 'maken' wetenschappers op een afgelegen eiland dinosaurussen met DNA dat ze uit muggen uit de tijd van de dinosaurussen extraheren. Het boek zelf werd in eerste instantie maar door weinig mensen opgemerkt, maar de film zorgde ervoor dat de ontwikkeling van nieuwe technologieen in de 'life sciences' opeens in ieders belangstelling stond. De Nijmeegse filosoof Hub Zwart, onder andere verbonden aan het Centre for Society and Genomics, schrijft over Crichton en zijn werk:

'(T)his is typical for the work of Michael Crichton, a Harvard graduate whose novels tend to be extremely well documented and based on extensive bibliographical research. He is surprisingly au courant with the latest developments in American (notably West-Coast) science. Jurassic Park describes “converging technologies”: mixtures of palaeontology, molecular techniques and computational biology. Due to Crichton’s thorough knowledge of these research fields, his work is not only taken seriously by “real” scientists,but also allows lay audiences to enter the otherwise impenetrable world of high-tech laboratories. He writes about gene sequencing, enzymes and computer programs in a way that experts experience as credible. In short, Jurassic Park (the novel) offers a fairly convincing picture of present-day laboratory life. But that is not all. Crichton not only manages to capture the way science is done nowadays (notably in California where he lives), but he is also remarkably in tune with the basic responses evoked by scientific innovations among the public at large. Crichton is not only au courant with major research developments in terms of methods, equipment and terminology, but he also displays an almost intuitive affinity with the basic scripts and images that structure public responses to the life sciences. His novels convey both the fascination and the apprehension evoked by cutting edge research. Therefore, besides being a novel about science, his best-seller is at the same time a novel about popular imagination. It constitutes a forum, so to speak, where both styles of thinking about and responding to new research possibilities are carefully fleshed out in a fairly convincing manner and exposed to one another' (zie website http: //www.filosofie.science.ru.nl/cv/compepistemology.pdf)