Jurassic Park

 

Jurassic Park

(Jurassic Park #1)

by 

 

5 Stars

 

Michael Crichton has long been my favorite author, and I have been happily rereading all of his books recently.  A frequent theme in Crichton’s work is the idea of science and technology being misused, or at least not accorded the respect that they deserve, often with disastrous results.  Jurassic Park is probably the best known of those books and rereading it now in the time of COVID and climate change made me realize how timely some of Crichton’s ideas are.  The world is fighting a deadly virus that probably originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.  Scientists thought they could safely study the virus, but clearly they were wrong.  It got out, with disastrous results.  To paraphrase Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, life found a way.  Climate change, the idea that human activity is dramatically accelerating the pace of global warming, is another threat we hear about every day.  Decades ago we humans harnessed the power of fossil fuels to do vast amounts of work for us, but no one realized at the time that there might be serious consequences to that dramatic technological achievement.  If we are going to beat the challenges of deadly viruses and an ever-warming planet, we will have to rely on science once again and that thought is rather sobering if one considers that our lack of respect or at least of foresight for scientific power have contributed so mightily to the current problems.  I’m certainly not suggesting that we abandon science and return to the Stone Age, but I do hope that we might start to learn some lessons and think more carefully about the consequences of our advances.  To paraphrase Jurassic Park once again, we need to stop and consider that just because we can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that we should do it.

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My Recent Reads

Mike's Books

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