INTERVIEW MICHAEL CRICHTON, AUTHOR OF NEXT Q1: 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. Q2: 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.

Q3: 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.

Q4: 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.