The Andromeda Strain

by Michael Crichton

Leavitt’s Rule of 48 said simply, “All Scientists Are Blind.” And Leavitt had invoked his rule when he saw the reception Karp and others received. Leavitt went over the reports and the papers and found no reason to reject the meteorite studies out of hand; many of the experiments were careful, well reasoned, and compelling.

scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and your instruments, but in the end your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.

Biology, as George Wald had said, was a unique science because it could not define its subject matter. Nobody had a definition for life.

He often argued that human intelligence was more trouble than it was worth. It was more destructive than creative, more confusing than revealing, more discouraging than satisfying, more spiteful than charitable.

There were times when he saw man, with his giant brain, as equivalent to the dinosaurs. Every schoolboy knew that dinosaurs had outgrown themselves, had become too large and ponderous to be viable. No one ever thought to consider whether the human brain, the most complex structure in the known universe, making fantastic demands on the human body in terms of nourishment and blood, was not analogous.

If brains grew larger, and better, then perhaps they would consume more—perhaps so much that, like an infection, they would overrun their hosts and kill the bodies that transported them.