The Andromeda Strain (1969), by
Michael CrichtonJohn Michael Crichton or Michael Crichton was an American author, producer, director, screenwriter, and medical school graduate, best known for his work in the science fiction, medical fiction, and thriller genres. His books have sold over 150 million copies worldwide, and many have been adapted...
, is a
techno-thrillerTechno-thrillers are a hybrid genre, drawing subject matter generally from spy thrillers, war novels, and science fiction. They include a disproportionate amount of technical detail on its subject matter ; only science fiction tends towards a comparable level of supporting detail on the technical...
novelA novel is a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
documenting the efforts of a team of scientists investigating a deadly
extraterrestrialExtraterrestrial life is defined as life which does not originate from planet Earth. The existence of life outside the planet is theoretical and all assertions of such life remain disputed....
microorganism that rapidly and fatally clots human blood while, in other people, inducing insanity that mostly ended in the insane people committing
suicideSuicide is the intentional killing of one's self. Many dictionaries also note the metaphorical sense of "willful destruction of one's self-interest"...
or
murder-suicideA murder-suicide is an act in which an individual kills one or more other persons immediately before killing him or herself.-Combinations:The combination of murder and suicide can take various forms, including:...
. It became a New York Times Bestseller. This novel established Michael Crichton as a best-selling genre author.
Plot summary
When a military
satelliteIn the context of spaceflight, a satellite is an object which has been placed into orbit by human endeavor. Such objects are sometimes called artificial satellites to distinguish them from natural satellites such as the Moon....
returns to Earth, a recovery team is dispatched to retrieve it; during a live radio communication with their base, the team members suddenly die. Aerial surveillance reveals that everyone in
Piedmont, ArizonaPiedmont is a ghost town in Yavapai County, Arizona, United States. It was located between the Weaver Mountains and the Date Creek Mountains of Arizona, on Date Creek Road . It was near the ghost towns of Congress and Hillside. All that remains of the town is the sign, along the Atchison, Topeka...
, the town closest to where the satellite landed, is apparently dead. The base commander suspects the satellite returned with an extraterrestrial organism and recommends activating Wildfire, the government-sponsored team that counters
extraterrestrialExtraterrestrial life is defined as life which does not originate from planet Earth. The existence of life outside the planet is theoretical and all assertions of such life remain disputed....
biological infestation.
The Wildfire scientific team studying the unknown strain comprises Dr. Jeremy Stone,
molecular biologyMolecular biology is the study of biology at a molecular level. The field overlaps with other areas of biology and chemistry, particularly genetics and biochemistry...
specialist; Dr. Peter Leavitt, disease
pathologyPathology is the study and diagnosis of disease through examination of organs, tissues, bodily fluids, and whole bodies...
; Dr. Charles Burton, infection vectors specialist; and Dr. Mark Hall, M.D., surgeon,
biochemistryBiochemistry is the study of the chemical processes in living organisms. It deals with the structure and function of cellular components such as proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, nucleic acids and other biomolecules....
and
pHpH is a measure of the acidity or basicity of a solution. It is defined as the cologarithm of the activity of dissolved hydrogen ions . Hydrogen ion activity coefficients cannot be measured experimentally, so they are based on theoretical calculations...
specialist. He is the 'odd man', since he is the only one without a family. A fifth scientist, Dr. Christian Kirke, electrolytes specialist, was unavailable for duty because of
appendicitisAppendicitis is a condition characterized by inflammation of the appendix. It is a medical emergency. All cases require removal of the inflamed appendix, either by laparotomy or laparoscopy. Untreated, mortality is high, mainly because of peritonitis and shock...
.
The scientists believe the satellite, which was actually designed to capture upper-atmosphere microorganisms for bio-weapon exploitation, returned with a deadly microorganism that kills by
disseminated intravascular coagulationDisseminated intravascular coagulation , also known as consumptive coagulopathy, is a pathological activation of coagulation mechanisms that happens in response to a variety of diseases. As its name suggests, it leads to the formation of small blood clots inside the blood vessels throughout the body...
. On investigating the town, the Wildfire team discovers that the residents either died in mid-stride or went "quietly nuts" and committed bizarre suicides. Two Piedmont inhabitants, the sick,
SternoSterno Canned Heat is a fuel made from denatured and jellied alcohol. It is designed to be burned directly from its can. Its primary use is in the food service industry for buffet heating. Other uses are for camp stoves and as an emergency heat source...
-addicted, geriatric Peter Jackson; and the constantly-bawling infant, Jamie Ritter, are biologic opposites who somehow survived the organism.
The man, infant, and satellite are taken to the secret underground Wildfire laboratory, a secure facility equipped with every known capacity for protection against a biological element escape into the atmosphere, including a nuclear weapon to incinerate the facility if necessary. Wildfire is hidden in a remote area near the fictional town of Flatrock, Nevada, sixty miles from Las Vegas using a method similar to that in the book
The Purloined Letter"The Purloined Letter" is a short story by American author Edgar Allan Poe. It is the third of his three detective stories featuring the fictional C. Auguste Dupin, the other two being "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt". These stories are considered to be important...
, by locating it in the sub-basements of a legitimate
Department of AgricultureThe United States Department of Agriculture is the United States federal executive department responsible for developing and executing U.S. federal government policy on farming, agriculture, and food...
research station.
Further investigation determines that the bizarre deaths were caused by a crystal-structured, extraterrestrial microbe on a meteor that crashed into the satellite, knocking it from orbit. The microbe contains chemical elements required for terrestrial life, but lacks
DNADeoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms and some viruses. The main role of DNA molecules is the long-term storage of information...
,
RNARibonucleic acid is a biologically important type of molecule that consists of a long chain of nucleotide units. Each nucleotide consists of a nitrogenous base, a ribose sugar, and a phosphate...
, proteins, and
amino acidAmino acids are molecules containing an amine group, a carboxylic acid group and one of the twenty R-groups. These molecules are particularly important in biochemistry, where this term refers to alpha-amino acids with the general formula H
2NCHRCOOH, where R is an organic substituent...
s, yet it directly transforms matter to energy and vice versa.
The microbe, code named "Andromeda", mutates with each growth cycle, changing its biologic properties. The scientists learn that Andromeda grows only within a narrow
pHpH is a measure of the acidity or basicity of a solution. It is defined as the cologarithm of the activity of dissolved hydrogen ions . Hydrogen ion activity coefficients cannot be measured experimentally, so they are based on theoretical calculations...
range; in a too-acid or too-basic growth medium, it will not multiply — Andromeda's pH range is 7.39–7.43, like that of human blood. Thus, that is why Jackson and Ritter survived, both had abnormal blood pH; however, by the time the scientists realize that, Andromeda's current mutation degrades polymer plastic and escapes its containment. Trapped in an Andromeda-contaminated laboratory, Dr. Burton demands that Stone inject him with Kalocin ("the universal antibiotic"); Stone refuses, arguing it would render Burton too vulnerable to infection by other harmful bacteria. Burton survives because Andromeda has already mutated to nonlethal form.
The mutated Andromeda attacks the
neopreneNeoprene or polychloroprene is a family of synthetic rubbers that are produced by polymerization of chloroprene. It is used in a wide variety of applications, such as in wetsuits, laptop sleeves, orthopedic braces , electrical insulation, liquid and sheet applied elastomeric membranes or...
door and hatch seals within the Wildfire complex, racing to the upper levels and the surface. The self-destruction atomic bomb is automatically armed when it detects a containment breach, triggering its detonation countdown to incinerate all exo-biological diseases. As the bomb arms, the scientists realize that given Andromeda's ability to generate matter directly from energy, the organism would feed, reproduce, and ultimately benefit from an
atomic explosionA nuclear explosion occurs as a result of the rapid release of energy from an intentionally high-speed nuclear reaction. The driving reaction may be nuclear fission, nuclear fusion or a multistage cascading combination of the two, though to date all fusion based weapons have used a fission device...
.
To halt the atomic detonation, Dr. Hall must insert his special key to an emergency substation anywhere in Wildfire. Unfortunately, he is trapped in an unfinished section with no substation. He must navigate Wildfire's obstacle course of automatic defenses to reach a working substation on an upper level. He barely disarms the bomb in time. Andromeda eventually mutates to a benign form and is suspected to have migrated to the upper atmosphere, where the oxygen content is lower, better suiting Andromeda's growth.
The novel's epilogue reveals that a manned spacecraft,
Andros V, was incinerated during atmospheric re-entry, because its polymer heat shield failed. Space flights are discontinued.
Odd-Man Hypothesis
The "Odd-Man Hypothesis" is a fictional
hypothesisA hypothesis is a proposed explanation for an observable phenomenon. The term derives from the Greek, ὑποτιθέναι - hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose." For a hypothesis to be put forward as a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it...
articulated in the novel's story and named in the film. In the novel, the Odd-Man explanation is a page in a
RAND CorporationThe RAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company and currently financed predominantly by the U.S. government, a private endowment, predominantly pharmaceutical corporations,...
report of the results of test series wherein different people (married, unmarried men and women) were to make command decisions in nuclear and biological wars and chemical crises. This is in the film:
The Odd-Man Hypothesis states that unmarried men are better able to execute the best, most dispassionate decisions in crises — in this case, to disarm the nuclear weapon intended to prevent the escape of organisms from the laboratory in the event the automatic destruct sequence is triggered.
Statistics follow,
Group: Index of Effectiveness: 0.343 for married men, 0.824 for single, male scientists, et cetera; then each scientist's command decision effectiveness index: Stone 0.687, Burton 0.543, Kirke 0.614, Leavitt 0.601, and Hall 0.899; thus, Dr. Hall is given the key to halt the Wildfire Laboratory's automated self-destruction, should it become necessary. Moreover, considering Hall's knowledge of electrolytes, Leavitt admits that the Odd-Man Hypothesis is essentially why Hall was drafted to the Wildfire team.
In the book, Stone admits the Odd Man Hypothesis was basically a created theory to justify handing over a nuclear weapon to private individuals (the Wildfire team).
In both book and film, Hall is briefed on the Hypothesis after his arrival at Wildfire. In the film, he is criticized for failure to read the material ahead of time, while in the book, his copy of the briefing materials has the Hypothesis pages removed.
This fabrication of scientific documentation (numbers, charts, etc.) is part of the
false documentA false document is a form of verisimilitude that attempts to create a sense of authenticity beyond the normal and expected suspension of disbelief for a work of art...
literary techniqueA literary technique or literary device is an identifiable rule of thumb, convention or structure that is employed in literature and storytelling....
.
Main characters
- Dr. Jeremy Stone — Professor of Bacteriology at the University of California at Berkeley; a Nobel Prize winner
- Dr. Charles Burton — Professor of pathology at the Baylor College of Medicine
Baylor College of Medicine, located in Houston, Texas, USA, is one of the world's leading centers for biomedical research and clinical care. Situated within the Texas Medical Center, a complex that is home to 46 member institutions and is the largest medical center in the world, Baylor College of...
- Dr. Peter Leavitt — Clinical microbiologist; suffering from epilepsy
Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by recurrent unprovoked seizures...
- Dr. Mark Hall — Medical doctor and surgeon;
- Dr. Christian Kirke — Anthropologist; electrolytes specialist does not participate in Wildfire project due to illness
Quotations
- "A man with binoculars. That is how it began: with a man standing by the side of the road, on a crest overlooking a small Arizona town, on a winter night. Lieutenant Roger Shawn must have found the binoculars difficult. The metal would be cold, and he would be clumsy in his fur parka and heavy gloves." page #3
- "Biology, the retarded child. . . . Even in the time of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon and other heavenly bodies than they did about their own."
- "First contact with extraterrestrial life will be determined by the known probabilities of speciation. . . . Complex organisms are rare on earth. . . . Simple organisms flourish in abundance. . . . There are millions of bacteria, thousands of insects but few primates. . . . Frequency of speciation goes with a corresponding frequency in numbers. . . . Human interaction with extra terrestrial will . . . [be] identical to bacteria or viruses."
- "It was equally possible for extra terrestrial to contaminate the earth via space probes."
- "We've faced up to quite a planning problem here. How to disinfect the human body — one of the dirtiest things in the known universe — without killing the person at the same time."
Adaptations
In 1971,
The Andromeda Strain was the basis for the eponymous
filmThe Andromeda Strain is a 1971 science-fiction film, based on the novel published in 1969 by Michael Crichton about a team of scientists who investigate a deadly organism of extraterrestrial origin that causes rapid, fatal blood clotting. Directed by Robert Wise, the film starred Arthur Hill, James...
directed by
Robert WiseRobert Earl Wise was an American sound effects editor, film editor, film producer and director...
, and featuring
Arthur HillArthur Edward Spence Hill was a Canadian actor best known for appearances in British and American theater, movies and television...
as Stone,
James Olson-Life and career:Olson was born in Evanston, Illinois and graduated from Northwestern University. He performed stage work in and around Chicago before his 1956 film debut in The Sharkfighters...
as Hall,
Kate ReidDaphne Kate Reid, OC was a Canadian stage, film and television actress.-Biography:Reid was born in London, England, the daughter of Canadian parents Helen Isabel and Walter Clarke Reid, who was a former Bengal Lancer in the Indian army and a retired colonel...
as Leavitt (changed to a female character, Ruth Leavitt), and
David WayneDavid Wayne was an American actor with a career spanning nearly half a century.Born Wayne James McMeekan in Traverse City, Michigan and growing up in Bloomingdale, Michigan, Wayne's first major Broadway role was Og the leprechaun in Finian's Rainbow, for which he won the Theatre World Award and...
as Dutton (Burton in the novel).
In 2008,
The Andromeda Strain was the basis for an eponymous
miniseriesThe Andromeda Strain is a 2008 science fiction miniseries, based on the novel published in 1969 by Michael Crichton about a team of scientists who investigate a deadly disease of extraterrestrial origin.-Plot:...
executive-produced by
RidleySir Ridley Scott is an English film director and producer known for his stylish visuals and an obsession for detail. His films include Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, Hannibal, Black Hawk Down, Matchstick Men, Kingdom of Heaven, American Gangster and Body of Lies...
and
Tony ScottAnthony "Tony" D. L. Scott is an English film director. His films include Top Gun, Days of Thunder, The Last Boy Scout, True Romance, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, Man on Fire and Spy Game...
and
Frank DarabontFrank Darabont is a Hungarian-American film director, screenwriter and producer. He has directed the films The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist.-Early life:...
, and featuring
Benjamin BrattBenjamin Bratt is an American actor. He is most famous for his role as Rey Curtis on the TV series Law & Order; and his appearances in the movies Blood in Blood Out, Miss Congeniality, Traffic, and Piñero...
as Stone. Other characters' names and personalities were radically changed from the novel.
Musically, the novel's wider, cultural influence is evidenced in the
science fictionScience fiction is a genre of fiction. It differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically-established or scientifically-postulated laws of nature...
,
death metalDeath metal is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal. It typically employs heavily distorted guitars, deep growling vocals, blast beat drumming, and complex song structures with multiple tempo changes....
band
NocturnusNocturnus was an American progressive death metal band formed in Tampa, Florida in 1987 by drummer/vocalist Mike Browning . They were known for their science-fiction themed lyrics and use of keyboards, both of which were virtually unknown in extreme metal...
who sing, inspired by the novel, the "Andromeda Strain" on their début album,
The KeyThe Key was the first full-length studio album from Florida, USA progressive death metal band, Nocturnus. It was released on Earache Records in 1990 and was followed by Thresholds two years later....
; the
Progressive metalProgressive metal is a fusion genre: a mixture of progressive rock and heavy metal. Progressive metal blends the powerful, guitar-driven sound of metal with the complex compositional structures, odd time signatures, and intricate instrumental playing of progressive rock...
band
Shadow GalleryShadow Gallery is an American progressive metal band formed in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, United States, during the early 1980s, originally under the name Sorcerer. After changing their name to Shadow Gallery and recording a short 8-track demo, the band was signed to Magna Carta Records in 1991...
have a song titled "The Andromeda Strain," about genetically engineered biological weapons, on their album
Room VRoom V is the fifth album by the progressive metal group Shadow Gallery, released in 2005 . It continues the story started in Tyranny, picking up after Tyranny's Act II...
; and
Klaus SchulzeKlaus Schulze is a German electronic music composer and musician. He also used the alias Richard Wahnfried. He was briefly a member of the electronic bands Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel before launching a solo career consisting of more than 50 albums lasting over 3 decades.-1970s:In 1969,...
has a concert recording titled "Andromeda Strain." In 1995, an independent band from Indianapolis, Indiana named themselves Odd Man and released a CD entitled
Hypothesis in reference to the fictional hypothesis contained in the story.