In 1968, a young Michael Crichton, still a student at Harvard Medical School, sent a manuscript to Robert Gottlieb, who had just taken over as editor-in-chief at Knopf. The document had a compelling title, “The Andromeda Strain,” and it featured a fast-paced plot: a group of scientists gather in an ultra-secret underground laboratory to study a deadly extraterrestrial organism, brought to Earth on a crashed space probe. Crichton later revealed that he had been inspired by a biology-textbook footnote about the possibility of organisms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. He had struggled with the manuscript for years—“every draft was awful”—but finally found inspiration from NASA. “When I finally learned that a complicated quarantine procedure really existed for the U.S. moon program,” he said in a 1969 interview, “it was a considerable psychological boost, and then I knew I could do the book.”
Read Full Article »
