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4.0 • 227 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
From Michael Crichton, the #1 bestselling author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, comes a devilishly clever, breathless tale of a new world where nothing is what it seems, and genetic ownership shatters our assumptions.
Welcome to our genetic world.
Fast, furious, and out of control.
This is not the world of the future—it's the world right now.
Is a loved one missing some body parts? Are blonds becoming extinct? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species? Humans and chimpanzees differ in only four hundred 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....
The future is closer than you think.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Crichton (Jurassic Park) once again focuses on genetic engineering in his cerebral new thriller, though the science involved is a lot less far-fetched than creating dinosaurs from DNA. In an ambitious effort to show what's wrong with the U.S.'s current handling of gene patents and with the laws governing human tissues, the author interweaves many plot strands, one involving a California researcher, Henry Kendall, who has mixed human and chimp DNA while working at NIH. Kendall produces an intelligent hybrid whom he rescues from the government and tries to pass off as a fully human child. Some readers may be disappointed by the relative lack of action, the lame attempts to lighten the mood with humor (especially centering on an unusually bright parrot named Gerard), and the contrived convergence of the main characters toward the end. Still, few can match Crichton in crafting page-turners with intellectual substance, and his opinions this time are less likely to create a firestorm than his controversial take on global warming in 2004's State of Fear.
Customer Reviews
Awesome book
Was a totally great book
Awful
I love Michael Crichton's writing normally, but this is awful. Stupid and insulting to the reader's intelligence. Don't buy it.
Bad In More Ways Than One
This is for sure the worst novel I have read by Crichton and at the time of this post I read Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Timeline, State Of Fear which I considered the worst previously , Prey, Rising Sun, and before reading this.
It was kind of like an anthology book with no proper main protagonist. The stories were not interesting very much and most stories had unsatisfactory conclusions.
Plus the question of who hired Eddie Tolman is never answered.