This book is about biotechnology, genetics, organs and tissues and the ethical, moral, and legal issues related to it. There are about nine set of characters who interact with each other in numerous plots. The story begins with Vasco Borden, a fugitive-recovery agent trailing Eddie Tolman who is trying to sell twelve frozen transgenic embryos in liquid nitrogen from his embryology lab. Borden did not see anybody take the embryos but when he examined the dewar after Tolman's death, they were empty. Tolman locked himself in the kitchen service elevator and opened the dewar, killing himself with the liquid nitrogen gas. In the same building, Jack Watson, a capitalist was giving a speech, selling biotechnology to the world. He partly funds BioGen Research led by CEO Rick Diehl. BioGen has won the bid to clinically test the Burnet cell line licensed by UCLA. This cells were taken and cultured from Frank Burnet, a cured cancer patient whose cells produced powerful cancer-fighting chemicals called cytokines. In a courtroom, Frank Burnet is suing UCLA for using his tissues in research and selling them commercially. He is fighting for ownership rights and royalty fees over his cells and he loses the battle with his attorney daughter, Alex. Then a stranger approached him and suggested that he can still legally sell his blood for a hundred million dollars in case BioGen "contaminates" all their samples which kept him thinking. At the BioGen lab, Josh Winkler gets an urgent call from his Mom. He has to pick up his cocaine-addict brother Adam from jail and take him home. While he takes a leak at the gas station, Adam inhales the spray containing the retrovirus with the "maturity or aging" gene intended for the rats thinking it was something to get high on. Adam suddenly "matures", goes into rehab, and gets a decent job. Josh' Mom tells a lot of people and Josh gives it to Eric Graham, a friend. Josh' partner Tom Weller, gets a phone call informing him his Dad died. He calls sister Lisa who insists he is not her father. Lisa gets a paternity test from the frozen blood sample which comes out negative. Her Mom insists on tests of her own to counter Lisa. The test shows he might have been poisoned with a substance and that he had the gene for heart disease. Mrs. Weller decided to cremate the body to get rid of any evidence but she is surprised to learn it could not happen because the arm and leg bones were replaced with metal pipes. She sues the mortuary and Tom sues the lab because the public document led his insurance to cancel his policy after learning about the heart disease gene. Meanwhile, at the Radial Genomics at La Jolla, Henry Kendall receives a phone call from his former employer, National Institute of Health about a female chimpanzee, Mary, he was working with four years before. Mary's offspring, Dave, is transgenic, looks like a chimpanzee but talks like a human. They want to compare Dave's DNA with his. Henry kidnaps Dave and takes him home. His wife Lynn accepts him as his son and they come up with Gandler-Kreukheim syndrome, a genetic mutation to explain Dave's appearance to their children, Tracy and Jamie. Dave goes to school with them and gets into all kinds of trouble with his "chimp" behavior. There are more plots going on about a French talking orangutan, a turtle with a glowing shell, a talking parrot...and genes that are debated on...the sociability gene, the gay gene, the risk-taking gene. Towards the end of the book, Frank Burnet disappears while all BioGen's Burnet cell cultures gets contaminated. Diehl hires Borden to kidnap Alex and son Jamie to get fresh blood samples and the pursuit takes them to the Kendall's house. How is Alex and Jamie going to escape from this? And where is Frank when they needed him most? Adam Winkler grows old fast while Eric Graham dies of a heart attack at twenty-one years old. Josh finds out the hard way that the maturity gene is not working right? What is he going to go with the lawsuits that are sure to come? In the Kendall household, Dave is getting to be popular. How is the world going to take it? Will NIH spill the beans to the biotech world of the academe? If you are interested in genes and how it works, this book will explain a lot of things. ( )

Thought-provoking stuff that raises many questions about issues that arise in today's genetic industries, but the sheer amount of different plotlines and characters muddled the message.

http://stuff-ive-read.blogspot.com/20... ( )

I did not enjoy this book. The problem was NOT the science. The science in the book was ridiculous, of course. Anyone who actually knows things about genetics will roll his eyes at various points throughout the story. But I do not find this objectionable in fiction. The only reason, in my opinion, that he has gotten criticism for the science aspects of the story is that he couches them in such "plausible-sounding" terms that it tends to make people think (or feel) that it's NOT fiction. It is "Da Vinci Code" syndrome, which is (in my opinion) a problem with the readers, not the story. No: anyone who can suspend disbelief enough to accept the "transporter room" in Star Trek should also have no objection to the science in this story.

The problem I had with this story was the characters. They were all caricatures. The women, for example, we all the same. Every single female character had the same personality: emotional, demanding, and irrational. Oh, except for the whores, who were manipulative and viscious. There was no real complexity, no real development. The men were plot devices used for describing situations that he wanted to set up, and the women were there as foils for the men.

Crichton obviously knows a lot about genetics, as is displayed in this book and many of his others. My recommendation to him is that between now and writing his next book, he get out in the world and learn a little more about women. Or even people in general. ( )

This is a strange and disjointed book. The scientific and legal sections are understandable, interesting, and thought provoking. The arguments against gene patents had me so riled up, I sought out the authors website and followed up with the Congressional Bill status reporting site, www.thomas.gov. The Patent Reform Act of 2007 got pulled in May and there doesn't seem to be much action to reform gene patenting except in Canada and Europe. The plot and action sections are jumbled, often disappointing, and well, awkward. Gerard the Parrot upstages the other characters which include bounty hunters, elementary school thugs, an unstoppable femme fatale, and an imprecating polyglot orangutan. There are the usual techno dweebs and evil bureaucrats but I couldn't find a hero except for maybe the author himself with his appeal for patent sanity. Too often I felt like what I was reading was meant for direct translation to the screen and then, out of the blue, a pedophile wannabe appears, then we are back to Gerard the perfect animated comic relief, then someone's bowel movements become rapid fire ammunition, then we have a long obtuse courtroom scene . . . Narrative cohesion is seriously lacking here but the multitalented author is a genius and way beyond my understanding (I'm not being sarcastic) so maybe he is getting with the new disjointed media. A science thriller is a diverting and invigorating way to be entertained and learn something at the same time. I just rank the book as a whole among Crichton's less successful. I disliked the science in "State of Fear" but liked the story. Before that, I really liked "Prey" and one of the reasons was the balance between the two. I also liked "Timeline" which had wacky science and a predictable plot, but interesting history throughout. ( )

This is a strange and disjointed book. The scientific and legal sections are understandable, interesting, and thought provoking. The arguments against gene patents had me so riled up, I sought out the authors website and followed up with the Congressional Bill status reporting site, www.thomas.gov. The Patent Reform Act of 2007 got pulled in May and there doesn't seem to be much action to reform gene patenting except in Canada and Europe. The plot and action sections are jumbled, often disappointing, and well, awkward. Gerard the Parrot upstages the other characters which include bounty hunters, elementary school thugs, an unstoppable femme fatale, and an imprecating polyglot orangutan. There are the usual techno dweebs and evil bureaucrats but I couldn't find a hero except for maybe the author himself with his appeal for patent sanity. Too often I felt like what I was reading was meant for direct translation to the screen and then, out of the blue, a pedophile wannabe appears, then we are back to Gerard the perfect animated comic relief, then someone's bowel movements become rapid fire ammunition, then we have a long obtuse courtroom scene . . . Narrative cohesion is seriously lacking here but the multitalented author is a genius and way beyond my understanding (I'm not being sarcastic) so maybe he is getting with the new disjointed media. A science thriller is a diverting and invigorating way to be entertained and learn something at the same time. I just rank the book as a whole among Crichton's less successful. I disliked the science in "State of Fear" but liked the story. Before that, I really liked "Prey" and one of the reasons was the balance between the two. I also liked "Timeline" which had wacky science and a predictable plot, but interesting history throughout. ( )