I'm giving the five stars not because of how it is written, but what it's about. Crichton was trained as a medical doctor before he was a novelist. And he died of cancer recently at a relatively young age. I am supposing he wrote this book after he was diagnosed. He knew there could be all kinds of ways of treating his disease that have not yet emerged from clinical trials. He was certainly angry at the medical establishment, at the research community, at Big Pharma, and at the government's policies regarding intellectual property rights for genetic discoveries. Crichton's books often have bibliographies, but this one also has an appendix containing his recommendations on legislative reform in the area of genetic research.

As to the book as literature, he interweaves multiple plots that converge here and there. It's a compelling drama of ideas, but it lacks the strong narrative thread. It won't make a good movie without sacrificing a lot of the interesting side issues. There's no single strong main character, no single ominous threat with ticking fuse. Oddly enough, my complaint about some of his more commercially successful books is that the plotting was too simplistic, too lean, as though designed for the movie script to simply fall out. I assumed he listened to CAA too much about how to structure his books because his agents cared not at all about them as literature, only about how much they would fetch for movie rights.

The best Crichton book, by far, is "The Great Train Robbery." Not sci-fi at all, just meticulous research, loads of detail, and great storytelling.