Michael Crichton's latest book caused me to do some serious questioning of some of my deeply held beliefs with regards to the environment. For example, was banning DDT really the right thing to do? Since that ban two million people a year are dying from malaria, mostly children. DDT is actually not poisonous to humans, nor carcinogenic. However, parathion which replaced it really is unsafe. More than 100 farm workers died in the months after the DDT ban because they simply did not know how to handle toxic chemicals. According to UN statistics, before the DDT ban deaths attributable to malaria were in the range of 50,000/year world wide. Now the mosquito borne disease is again a global scourge killing 50 million people since the ban.

The story line of State of Fear is about a large environmental group out to protect us from global warming. The issue quickly becomes the veracity of the perceived threat and the unwillingness of the activists to admit the numerous problems with their data. Radical groups are willing to kill, maim, and destroy in order to protect long term funding. Environmentalism has indeed become a big business in today's world.

People who are familiar with Crichton's work only via the movie screen may be unaware of an issue he has long championed: the need to do pure science, unfettered by expected outcomes of large bank rolls. The book Jurassic Park explores this theme in the author's introduction. It is not that successful businesses are inherently evil; the issue is when scientists are paid to research in search of specific findings, we stand the potential to miss truly important discoveries. Furthermore, directed research also can be harmful in a big way. Consider the consequences of the park for dinosaurs. They spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars to make the park safe, but life has a way of extending itself.

Crichton's novel Prey follows a similar scenario. Scientists have a specific goal, a lot of money is at stake, shortcuts are taken and ugly consequences are the end result.

The end results of Crichton's works are exciting stories with a lot of action and suspense. But underneath the plot, the characters, and the events there is an undercurrent of social responsibility that is getting louder with each book. Humanists frequently say that science is our tool to discover truth. However, there is a distinct difference between true science and applied technology. The former, by its very nature, is free of outside influences of its directions. Crichton is an articulate champion of freeing research and allowing, indeed demanding, that humans keep searching for the unknown. I believe that this is the true foundation of science.

State of Fear elucidates these concerns much more clearly. Indeed the book is full of temperature graphs, footnotes, and includes 15 pages of bibliography. The "good guy" in the novel frequently challenges other characters to check their data and their sources. Crichton has obviously done his homework.

--Wayne Wilson