"Next"...Scared Straight

If you have never read Next by Michael Crichton, I suggest you do.

  "Is a loved one missing some body parts? Are blondes becoming extinct? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species?" This is the opening of the book that serves not only as a delicious teaser, but prepares  you to enter the world that Crichton has masterfully weaved.  Flip a few pages and you are warned that "this book is fiction, except  for the parts that aren't." The book has several subplots but is primarily focused on the story of a four year old boy named Dave, who suffers from a fictious disease called Gandler-Kreukheim. Among his symptoms are excessive hairiness and a talent for climbing trees. Why? Because Dave is a transgenic creature, part human and part chimpanzee. He was created in a laboratory by a scientist who, in the course of research on autism, inserted his own genes into a chimpanzee embryo. The researcher hoped to create and then dissect a fetus, but things got a little out of hand.

As the book continues with the oddities, we are shown just what our world might come to. Girls given fertility drugs so that they may sell their eggs to the highest bidder, insurance companies dropping clients because of a gene found in relatives, (thanks to President Obama for preventing this with the new healthcare law), even criminals using genetic testing as a defense to prove that they carry a certain gene that predisposes them to crime.

As I dwelved further into the book I began to understand the aforementioned warning. Though the author has indeed created these fictitious events, many are replays of real events, greatly understating the book’s scary legitimacy.


Pick up a copy and read it for yourself. Just make sure it is during the daytime.