Michael Crichton: I feel we live in a society where technology has just phenomenal boosterism from the corporations that are making the technology and the people who are buying it. With each new technology, there are these fantastic claims that are made, and these fantastic hopes that people have for it and it never really turns out. You know, I’m old enough so that when I was, not in my life, not that much younger than you, television was introduced. For the first ten years of my life there was no tv. So I remember a world without television and I remember what people said when television came in, about how it was going to be this wonderful universal education and everyone was going to know all the plays of the western world, and you know in reality it turns out to be shows about people sticking their faces in plates full of bugs and eating them. One of the early founders of television who worked all through the beginning said ‘You know we had these great hopes for this medium and what we’ve actually invented is biggest waste of time in the history of mankind.’ And there’s a way in which all of that is true. You know the automobile offers universal freedom and transportation for everybody but we all sit in traffic jams. So there’s this, kind of I don’t want to say it too strongly, selfdefeating aspect of technology. So I always just look at the other side of things. Anthropology in my way of thinking is a way of looking at the world. It’s a sort of I don't’ know if you know much about it but its kind of a combination field of many different disciplines that involves everything from psychology to really medicine. I studied physical anthropology, which is sort of CSI stuff. We were given for example, one of the things we had to do was identify bone specimens. So, we would have these quizzes where they would hand around little bits of wrist bone and you were supposed to say whether it was male of female, left or right, all that stuff. So we were trained to identify physical remains that you would find on an archaeological site. That’s one part of anthropology. Another part of anthropology is you know, social behavior, how people interact in the ways that they do. Its not always widely shared knowledge. When I wrote, how many years ago, about fourteen years ago a book called Rising Sun, that talked about the differences between Japanese and Japanese society and the United States it called a lot of furor here, because people claimed that it was racist but in fact I was just doing what was anthropological thinking.DDT was a subject of a kind of hysteria in the early 1960s. There are a few things to say about it. One is that because it is actually quite safe you can eat it, and the reason why we know that is there was an experiment where they fed it to prisoners for a couple of years, a certain amount of powder everyday and they were okay. There’s was also at one time a very unusual much undiscussed study which seemed to suggest that DDT exposure decreased your risk of cancer. But the short version is it was heavily used, it was clearly overused. The extent to which it remained in the environment, the extent to which it became concentrated going up the food chain, the extent to which it was deleterious to birds, the extent to which it thinned egg shells, those were all things that people were terrified about. And the information they had, if you go back and look for example at Rachel Carson and the evidence that she cites. That kind of evidence is completely unacceptable forty years later. You know the guy who was doing the egg shells study, he was also not giving the birds enough calcium and that alone will you know. The final outcome is as I understand it that some birds of prey are absolutely susceptible, peregrine falcons are absolutely susceptible to DDT. DDT arguably has certain other effects. It’s never been demonstrated to be carcinogenic. And the reason why any of this is a point of discussion is that by eliminating DDT malaria worldwide exploded. Malaria had been the great scourge of mankind in the 20th century, one by one, illnesses like yellow fever were either dampened down, most of these diseases were in the United States you know in the 1900s. The United States had malaria in the south for example and it was gone. So DDT took the total number of malaria cases in India I think down to 50,000 a year. And so it was a true miracle not that it wasn’t you know also coming at situations where there were malaria resistant mosquitoes and so on. Nevertheless, across the globe it was a powerful, powerful way to save lives. When it was banned by Ruckleshaus in 72 or 73 in this country, he specifically excluded medical uses from the ban so that it could be used abroad. Environmental groups eager to make a name for themselves pushed hard and in fact I think the ban was really made final around the world in 2001 which was way too late.