And, You went away too!

The end came on November 4! The world lost Michael Crichton!

But for him, we would not have known the Jurassic Park, the Lost World, Congo, Andromeda Strain and many many more. Apart from the wonderful author and filmmaker that he was, he was also a Doctor, having received his Doctoral Degree in Medicine from the Harvard Medical School. That, folks is just the beginning of what was a long list of commendable accomplishments.

He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he spent time researching public policy while also teaching anthropology at Cambridge University. Amid all this, he also found time to do some writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His speeches on Genetic Research, Complexity Theory, Global Warming, Extra-terrestrials and the Environment were very well received, are descriptive of impeccable knowledge and hold immense scientific and political significance.

I will remember him for being the author who wrote with ease, his process of thought, in a measure of clarity and description like none other.

While I respectfully and rather painfully bid adieu to this remarkable soul, I would like to conclude this post by quoting lines from his speech at the Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy, Washington, D.C., on November 6, 2005, where he criticized environmental groups for failing to incorporate the complexity theory.

In his talk he spoke of the importance of the theory of complexity in environmental management. The lines are very apt, simple to comprehend and extremely relevant in today's rapidly deteriorating environment and highlights how unsuccessful we human beings are while trying to understand systems that we co-exist with.

"Most people assume linearity in environmental processes, but the world is largely non-linear: it's a complex system. An important feature of complex systems is that we don’t know how they work. We don’t understand them except in a general way; we simply interact with them. Whenever we think we understand them, we learn we don’t. Sometimes spectacularly."

Footnotes

With inputs from Michael Crichton - The Official Site
Image Courtesy - Wikipedia