The Andromeda Strain

by Michael Crichton

Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical. Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. Even in the time of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon and other heavenly bodies than they did about their own. It

there had never been a biologic crisis. The Andromeda Strain provided the first.

a crisis is a situation in which a previously tolerable set of circumstances is suddenly, by the addition of another factor, rendered wholly intolerable.

every crisis has its beginnings long before the actual onset.

a crisis is compounded of individuals and personalities, which are unique:

A crisis is made by men, who enter into the crisis with their own prejudices, propensities, and predispositions. A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored.

A characteristic of all crises is their predictability, in retrospect. They seem to have a certain inevitability, they seem predestined. This is not true of all crises, but it is true of sufficiently many to make the most hardened historian cynical and misanthropic. In

One of the first rules of air reconnaissance was “Ignore the scenery”;

“The best adapted bacteria,” Burton used to say, “are the ones that cause minor diseases, or none at all.