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John Michael Crichton (born Author , Film Producer and Television Producer . His best-known works are Techno Thriller novels, Film s and Television Program s. Crichton describes his Genre as Techno-thriller which is usually the marriage of Action and Technical details. Many of his novels have medical or scientific underpinnings, reflecting his medical training and science background. Crichton directed the film '' Coma '', adapted from a Robin Cook novel, and there are other similarities in terms of Genre and the fact that both Cook and Crichton are Physicians , are of similar age and write about similar subjects. BIOGRAPHY John Michael Crichton was born on October 23 , 1942 in Chicago, Illinois to John Henderson Crichton and Zula Miller Crichton, and raised in Roslyn , Long Island , New York . He attended Harvard University , where he graduated Summa Cum Laude in Anthropology . He went on to teach Physical Anthropology at the University Of Cambridge in England, later returning to Massachusetts to gain an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School . Crichton has admitted to once, during his undergraduate study, Plagiarizing a work by George Orwell and submitting it as his own. The paper was received by his professor with a mark of "B−". Crichton has stated that the plagiarism was not intended to defraud the school, but rather as an experiment. Crichton believed that the professor in question had been intentionally giving him abnormally low marks, and so as an experiment Crichton informed another professor of his idea and submitted Orwell's paper as his own. Crichton admitted to plagiarizing when he was on the stand in the course of a lawsuit trying to defend the authenticity of '' Twister '', a movie which one individual claimed was based on his story entitled "Catch the Wind". While in medical school, he wrote novels under the pen names John Lange and '''Jeffrey Hudson''' (under which pseudonym '''A Case of Need''' won the 1969 Edgar Award ). He also co-authored '''Dealing''' with his younger brother Douglas Crichton under a shared pen name Michael Douglas. The back cover of that book contains a picture of Michael and Douglas at a very young age taken by their mother. His two pen names were both created to reflect his above-average height. According to his own words, he was about 206 ). Lange means '''tall one''' in Dutch , and Sir Jeffrey Hudson was a famous Seventeenth Century Dwarf in Queen Henrietta Maria 's court. Crichton has two sisters, Kimberly and Catherine, and a brother, Douglas. He is married to Sherri Alexander and has a daughter, Taylor, with ex-wife, Anne-Marie Martin. SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS In several of his books, Crichton popularized scientific and technological concepts which had not previously received widespread attention by non-scientists. Many of the ideas he used were novel to the average person, despite previous attention to them being given by some in the scientific community. For example, before ''Jurassic Park'', Robert T. Bakker 's theory of Warm-blooded and fast-moving dinosaurs had not received a great deal of attention in the popular media. Laypeople were accustomed to seeing Stop Motion clay dinosaurs crawling sluggishly over the volcanic prehistorical terrains. LITERARY TECHNIQUES From time to time, Crichton has recycled a well-known story's structure for his own story. For example: ''The Andromeda Strain'' was influenced by H. G. Wells ' '' The War Of The Worlds ''. However, rather than reusing the early Twentieth Century plot devices, Crichton introduced the idea of an imaginary microscopic Pathogen 's Evolution of Virulence with his own story. Most of his stories tend to be somewhat open-ended, including '' Jurassic Park '', '' Sphere '' and '' Prey ''. His work is consistently cautionary in that his plots invariably portray scientific advancements going awry, often with worst-case scenarios. Seldom if ever does Crichton portray scientific achievement as going according to plan. The use of Author Surrogate has been a feature of Crichton's writings since the beginning of his career. In '' A Case Of Need '', one of his pseudonym Whodunit stories, Crichton used first-person narrative to portray the hero, a Bostonian Pathologist , who is running against the clock to clear a good friend's name from Medical Malpractice in a girl's death from a hack job Abortion . That book was written in 1968, long before '' Roe V. Wade '' of 1973, the Landmark Case that Legalized abortion nationwide in the U.S. It took the hero about 160 pages to find the chief- Suspect , an underground abortionist, who was created to be the author surrogate. Then, Crichton gave that character three pages to justify his illegal practice. Some of Crichton's fiction uses a Literary Technique called False Document . For example, ''Eaters of the Dead'' is a fabricated recreation of the Old English epic '' Beowulf '' in the form of a scholastic translation of Ahmad Ibn Fadlan 's Tenth Century manuscript. Other novels, such as ''The Andromeda Strain'' and ''Jurassic Park'', incorporate fictionalized scientific documents in the form of diagrams, computer output, DNA sequences, footnotes and bibliography. In '' implanted with an experimental computerized device to control his seizures. '' Sphere '' contains a dialog, in which a panicked scientist in an underwater lab tries to talk the omnipotent but innocent "extraterrestrial life" out of manifesting beautiful aquatic creatures that are harmful to human beings. FICTION NON-FICTION Apart from fiction, Crichton has written several other books based on Scientific themes, amongst which is '' Travels '', which also contains Autobiographical Episodes . As a personal friend to the " Neo-Dadaist " artist Jasper Johns , Crichton compiled many of his works in a coffee table tome also named ''Jasper Johns''. That book has been updated once. Crichton is also the author of ''Electronic Life'', a book that introduces BASIC Programming to its readers. In his words, being able to program a computer is liberation: : ''In my experience, you assert control over a computer -- show it who's the boss -- by making it do something unique. That means programming it. ... '' {Link without Title} ''f you devote a couple of hours to programming a new machine, you'll feel better about it ever afterward.'' (p. 44) To prove his point, Crichton included many self-written demonstrative Applesoft (for Apple II )) and BASICA (for IBM PC compatibles) programs in that book. Crichton once considered updating it, but the project seemed to be cancelled. His non-fiction works are: MOVIES AND TELEVISION Crichton has written and directed several motion pictures: ''Westworld'' was the first feature film that used 2D Computer-generated Imagery (CGI) and the first use of 3D CGI was in its sequel, ''Futureworld'' (1976), which featured a computer-generated hand and face created by then University Of Utah graduate students Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke. Many of his novels have been filmed by others: He has written the screenplay for the movies '' Extreme Close Up '' ( 1973 ) and '' Twister '' ( 1996 ) (the latter co-written with Anne-Marie Martin, his wife at the time). Crichton is also the creator and executive producer of the television drama '' ER ''. In December of 1994, he achieved the unique distinction of having the #1 movie (''Disclosure''), the #1 TV show (''ER''), and the #1 book (''Disclosure'', atop the paperback list). AWARDS
SPEECHES "Aliens Cause Global Warming" In 2003 he gave a controversial lecture at and Junk Science —especially with regard to what he regards as popular but disputed theories such as Nuclear Winter , the dangers of Second-hand Smoke and the Global Warming Controversy . Crichton has been critical of widespread belief of ETs and UFOs, citing the fact that there is no conclusive proof of their existence. Crichton has commented that belief without a factual basis is more akin to faith. Environmentalism as a religion In a related speech given to the s who he asserts have Romantic ideas about Nature and our past, who he thinks believe in the initial "paradise", the human "sins", and the "judgement day". He also articulates his belief that it is the tendency of modern Environmentalist s to cling stubbornly to elements of their faith in spite of scientific evidence to the contrary. Crichton cites what he contends are misconceptions about DDT , second-hand smoke and global warming as examples (however these examples are heavily disputed in the scientific community). Widespread speculation in the media In a speech entitled "Why Speculate?" {Link without Title} , delivered in 2002 to the International Leadership Forum, Crichton took the media to task for engaging in what he saw as pointless speculation rather than the delivery of facts. As an example, he pointed to a front-page article of the '' for criticism, saying that it "presented hundreds of pages of quasi-statistical assertions based on a premise that was never demonstrated and that was almost certainly false". He referred to what he calls the " Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" to describe the public's tendency to discount one story in a newspaper they may know to be false because of their knowledge of the subject, but believe the same paper on subjects with which they are unfamiliar. Crichton used the Latin expression "'' Falsus In Uno, Falsus In Omnibus ''", which he translated as "untruthful in one part, untruthful in all", to describe what he thought a more appropriate reaction should be. The speech also made several references to Crichton's by-now-familiar skepticism of environmentalists' assertions about the possible future ramifications of human activity on Earth's environment. The Role of Science in Environmental Policy-Making In September 2005 Crichton testified at a Congressional hearing on climate change {Link without Title} , having been called by Senator James Inhofe . CRITICISM Many of Crichton's publicly expressed views, particularly on subjects like the Global Warming Controversy , have caused heated debate. As pointed out in Dr. Jeffrey M. Masters' review of '' State Of Fear '', {Link without Title} lawed or misleading presentations of Global Warming science exist in the book, including those on Arctic sea ice thinning, correction of land-based temperature measurements for the Urban Heat Island effect, and Satellite vs. ground-based measurements of Earth's warming. I will spare the reader additional details. On the positive side, Crichton does emphasize the little-appreciated fact that while most of the world has been warming the past few decades, most of Antarctica has seen a cooling trend. The Antarctic ice sheet is actually expected in increase in mass over the next 100 years due to increased precipitation, according to the IPCC (although recent findings by NASA call this result into question). Additionally, Crichton correctly points out that there has been no rise in hurricane activity in the Atlantic over the past few decades (a point unchanged by the record four hurricanes that struck Florida in 2004). Another example is this criticism of Jurassic Park: : ''The scientific scheme is not completely outrageous; unless one looks too closely, ... Although they are dinosaurs ..., they could have been any death-dealing automata ... substitute hostile extraterrestrials, lunatic Nazis, or predatory androids and it would have been the same film with a different title -- ''''.'' (Henry Gee, "Jaws with Claws," ''Nature'' 363:681, 1993.) Another criticism of Crichton's novels is that they are generally based on the conceit of a "false revolution": while the novels describe potentially world-changing concepts such as alien plagues, cloned dinosaurs, and time travel, the books seem to always end with the threat destroyed or the scientific breakthrough lost. In other words, the events described in the novels might as well never have happened in the context of their fictional universes. Critics feel that this allows Crichton to avoid having to describe how, for example, time travel or cloning of extinct animals would change society. Critical essays of Crichton's work and/or ideas:
Specific criticisms of '' State Of Fear '':
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