My mom and I listened to The Andromeda Strain (1969) by Michael Crichton. We really enjoyed listening to it and it was quite the page turner. It has an exploration of a lot of interesting scientific topics including what exactly is life, drugs and investigation techniques. Along with quite a few political topics on how experts are treated by the government and the communication methods. It’s told through a series of reports and third person descriptions which is quite enjoyable, reminding me of similar novels told with fake reports. With this high praise I have quite a few issues with the description of a few things. I am by no means a biochemist or any other type of expert, but I do have an interest in logistics and how big things get done. A lot of my issues can be resolved by realizing that it is a product of its time.
It is a techno-thriller about an extraterrestrial microorganism that is retrieved from a high atmosphere scoop program. One of the scoops goes wrong and lands in a small town called Piedmont, Arizona. This results in the release of an organism that kills the entire town except for 2 people. An old man with ulcers who pops aspirin like it’s candy and drinks Sterno. A baby who was crying when found. Both of these conditions alter the PH of the body according to the book.
A process is kicked off internally from the discovery of a dead town and results in the government calling a conference of experts. The experts are already selected as they invented the “wildfire” program. “Wildfire” is a facility located in the Nevada desert dedicated to being a top secret warm-standby facility for researching virulent pathogens. The survivors of Piedmont, AZ are taken to this facility.
We are also introduced to our heroic doctors who all seem relatively similar to me in their goals and concerns and shall not be named cause I could not differentiate between them in my listen except with the narrator’s voice. In order to work on the disease they are forced to go through an intensive sterilization procedure on every part of their body, and are examined by an automated doctor robot hooked into the central computer.
After a chapter is devoted to the unpleasantness of this sterilization procedure. (How were the patients put into level 5 without going through the same or similar procedures?) The doctors are finally able to begin work. Various high tech tools to dissect the disease are described, and to protect the doctors from being infected. From the most impressive microscopes to fully stocked chemistry and imaging facilities, they have it all including extremely weird whole body glove boxes. You crawl through a tunnel that seals itself up to access the patient. Such an incredibly bizarre concept.
Eventually it is discovered that the disease is shaped like hexagons and has no organelles like life on Earth does. No DNA either. It just is. It also requires a very stable environment to replicate. At some point one of the doctors becomes infected with the strain. However by that point it is no longer lethal. Instead it likes to eat plastic. As is unfortunately discovered by a fighter jet pilot flying over Piedmont because his oxygen hose ends up getting eaten and crashes. So much for sterilizing the area and containing the infection.
The breach in containment also leads to the base starting it’s auto destruct countdown. There is a single man who can stop the countdown. The odd man who “makes better decisions” is a designated key holder, but the key holes are not conveniently located because yet again poor planning or incomplete thinking (Yet all the other logistics are fulfilled). They stop the countdown because for some reason this strain feeds on energy and replicates from it. It can’t be killed, only forced to cease replicating by non-ideal conditions. There’s also talk of a magical super antibiotic during this time with a massive downside. The book ends with a space crew dying on re-entry because of Andromeda strain Kessler syndrome because it eats the plastic heat shield.
Overall, it’s a great example of a techno-thriller but the plot holes are extremely frustrating. It suffers from the rule of cool in that these techniques and tools are described in the coolest way possible, yet they are unworkable. The biggest example to me is the sterilization procedures. The paper gowns thrown away every 12 hours and cleaning your body with various kinds of bleach. (Don’t forget to take the antibiotic suppository on level 4.) The writing is extremely compelling but as soon as I stepped away and thought about it I was frustrated and went back for me. Hoping that the holes would be filled in by his own rules within the world. However they never are. It’s something I wish to complain about at length below.
Things that bother me about the Andromeda Strain
- The sterilization procedures to move between floors of the wildfire facility would actually make someone more vulnerable to infection. Especially when compared with true life stories of infectious disease research as described by Richard Preston. In real life they depend on a shower that covers their bunny suits with bleach or similar. There is no 5 stage cleanse and they stay at normal everyday hotels.
- The timeline of the sterilization procedures would take 4 days to pass into level 5. By that point the patients would have been dead. There didn’t seem to be any reporting on the patients in the interim while entering the facility.
- The incredible amount of supplies dedicated to this lab. They have access to everything, but the novel didn’t say that anything was regularly exercised. It’s incredibly expensive to run such a stockpile and a poor use of resources. As such can we really trust the level of training at this facility if the skills are not regularly practiced.
- This also comes with the claim that this facility is one of the top 20 military facilities in the United States, and at the same time one of the most classified. It would of course be an important facility but it wouldn’t be as secret as they think. This is covered up as a USDA corn breeding facility for arid environments.
- The on site blood bank also bothers me with allocation of resources. There is typically not enough blood to go around. Whatever blood required should have gone through a requisition system instead of keeping short shelf life products there. A caveat to my thoughts is the location of Wildfire being way out in the desert, but is made up by the extreme logistics available.
- At the beginning of the book, they went out of their way to gas and kill all the birds in Piedmont, Az.
- There was a robot that was capable of automatically starting an IV. Even today this only really exists in universities and has not seen much use outside.
- The sheer amount of shiny automation within the labs seems excessive. Most automation tends to be brittle until it’s properly battle tested. The novel seems to call it the only facility of its kind as such things should be more broken.
- The private access to a nuke is bothersome, and the fact that the nuke is wired into an automated system.
- The experimental miracle drug being suppressed. I could see it being very useful if it was administered in the right circumstances. A clean room and proper procedures being applied to restore the gut biome. If we managed to save the bubble babies we can save a lot more people by following similar isolation procedures. Although the gruesome ways the “volunteers” passed definitely is depressing and alarming. (Also the fact that it was tested on “volunteer” prisoners)