Next

Is a loved one missing some body parts? Are blondes becoming extinct? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species? Humans and chimpanzees differ in only 400 genes; is that why a chimp fetus resembles a human being? And should that worry us? There's a new genetic cure for drug addiction?is it worse than the disease?

We live in a time of momentous scientific leaps, a time when it's possible to sell our eggs and sperm online for thousands of dollars and to test our spouses for genetic maladies.

We live in a time when one fifth of all our genes are owned by someone else, and an unsuspecting person and his family can be pursued cross-country because they happen to have certain valuable genes within their chromosomes . . .

Devilishly clever, Next blends fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where nothing is what it seems and a set of new possibilities can open at every turn.

Next challenges our sense of reality and notions of morality. Balancing the comic and the bizarre with the genuinely frightening and disturbing, Next shatters our assumptions and reveals shocking new choices where we least expect.

The future is closer than you think.

Michael Crichton?s novels include Pirate Latitudes, Next, State of Fear, Prey, Timeline, Jurassic Park, and The Andromeda Strain. He is also known as a filmmaker and the creator of ER. One of the most popular writers in the world, he has sold over 200 million books, which have been translated into thirty-six languages; thirteen have been made into films. He remains the only writer to have had the number one book, movie, and TV show at the same time.

A Q&A with Michael Crichton
Author of NEXT

Q: As with many of your other novels, NEXT is a vivid dramatization of what can happen when cutting-edge science goes a little too far. Is NEXT a cautionary tale?

MC: Well, I think it is, in the sense that many of my books are. But for me what's different about this book is that so much of it is real - or that so much of it is very thinly-disguised versions of actual events that have occurred. Genetics, which is the subject of the book, has advanced extraordinarily rapidly in the last 15 years or so and has sometimes gone in directions that many people are troubled about, or disapprove of. It is a very interesting and hot contentious area.

Q:What scares you the most about NEXT? And conversely, which possibilities do you find the most encouraging?

MC: I'm not really scared about anything in the genetic realm. My research actually reassured me, because I concluded that many of the things people discuss with great fear or great longing - such as designer babies, or extended longevity - are probably not going to happen.

I think that we'll have some remarkable new therapies from this area, and we will also find that the genome is vastly more complicated than we anticipated. In that sense, the genome is a bit like the human brain-much harder to understand than we once imagined.

Q:What first sparked your interest in genetics?

MC: It's a longstanding interest of mine. I studied genetics and evolution in college, and of course as a medical student. Genetics has been one of the most exciting areas of scientific research in my lifetime. It's hard to remember that when I was born in the 1940s, people weren't really sure what a "gene" consisted of. And they thought human beings had 24 chromosomes, instead of 23! And they had no idea at all how an embryo grew and differentiated into a live birth.

Q: After the final thrilling page, what would you most like readers to take away from NEXT?

MC: The future is bright and exciting, and it will challenge us to think in fresh ways about our lives. But among our challenges today, we have some legal problems in genetics that need to be fixed. We need some laws passed, and some laws changed.

But I am optimistic about the future. Very optimistic.