He was educated at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, A.B. (summa cum laude) 1964 (Phi Beta Kappa). He went on to become the Henry Russell Shaw Travelling Fellow, 1964-65 and Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at Cambridge University, England, 1965. He graduated Harvard Medical School, gaining an M.D. 1969 and did post-doctoral fellowship study at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, La Jolla, California 1969-1970. In 1988, he was Visiting Writer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A strong credit to Crichton's entertainment work is that he is the only person to have had the number one movie, the number one book, and the number one television show in the United States at the same time.

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 cm (6' 9") tall in 1997 (see ^*). Lange means tall one in German and 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

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.

Fred Barnes, in Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush, states that George W. Bush "avidly read Michael Crichton's 2004 novel State of Fear, whose villain falsifies scientific studies to justify draconian steps to curb global warming....Early in 2005, political adviser Karl Rove arranged for Crichton to meet with Bush at the White House. They talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement. The visit was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more."

Literary techniques

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 The Terminal Man, Crichton created a dialog between two computer programs, good-natured Saint George and evil-minded Martha, variations on ELIZA. In the end, the Charlie Brown-like Saint George shouts "GO TO HELL I WILL KILL YOU:::::::::::::: ..." at the provocative Martha, foreshadowing a killing spree conducted by the ill-fated hero, an innocent epileptic 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

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. ... ^*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). Crichton has written only two episodes of ER: Episode 1-2: "Day One" and Episode 1-3: "Going Home".

Computer Games

In 1999 Crichton founded Timeline Computer Entertainment with David Smith. Despite signing a multi-title publishing deal with Eidos Interactive only one game was ever published, Timeline. Released on 8 December 2000 for the PC, the game received poor reviews and sold poorly.

Awards

• Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award, 1969 (A Case of Need) – as Jeffrey Hudson
• Association of American Medical Writers Award, 1970 (Five Patients)
• Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award, 1980 (The Great Train Robbery)
• The American Association of Petroleum Geologists Journalism Award, 2006 (State of Fear)
• A dinosaur, Crichtonsaurus bohlini, was named after him in honor of Jurassic Park^*.
• Crichton was named to the list of the "Fifty Most Beautiful People" by People magazine, 1992

Speeches

"Aliens Cause Global Warming"

Environmentalism as a religion

Widespread speculation in the media

The Role of Science in Environmental Policy-Making

In September 2005 Crichton testified at a Congressional hearing on climate change^*, having been called by Senator James Inhofe.

Criticism

^*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).

Crichton has also been criticized for having the protagonist of State of Fear assert,

Since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. The ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.

''DDT was never banned.

''You're right. Countries were just told that if they used it, they wouldn't get foreign aid.

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 -- Aliens, Raiders of the Lost Ark or Judgment Day. (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:

• Review of Michael Crichton's State of Fear – Dr. Jeffrey M. Masters, Chief Meteorologist at The Weather Underground

• Michael Crichton and Global Warming – David B. Sandalow, Environment Scholar for the Brookings Institute

• Science Fiction: Michael Crichton takes a novel approach to global-warming alarmism. – Iain Murray, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute

Specific criticisms of State of Fear:

• Michael Crichton's State of Confusion – Dr. Gavin A Schmidt, climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

• "Crichton's Thriller State of Fear: Separating Fact from Fiction" – Union of Concerned Scientists

• Answers to Key Questions Raised by M. Crichton in State of Fear – Pew Center on Global Climate Change

• Novel on global warming gets some scientists burned up – Seth Borenstein, Seattle Times

• Bad Science, Bad Fiction: In Michael Crichton's work, the two are intimately connected. – Chris Mooney, Washington correspondent for Seed Magazine

References

• Elizabeth A. Trembley, 1996, Michael Crichton: A Critical Companion, Greenwood Press, ISBN 031329414.

Notes