Michael Crichton and James Patterson’s “Eruption” is Riveting, but with a Shaky Genetic Foundation

I eagerly awaited publication of the novel Eruption, the brainchild of the late, great Michael Crichton and James Patterson, a master storyteller whose trademark staccato sentences and short chapters propel his thrillers. Crichton authored 28 novels, Patterson more than 200.

The Associated Press deemed Eruption “a seismic publishing event.” Proclaimed BookBub, “an “instant #1 New York Times bestseller was in the cards the moment James Patterson agreed to complete Michael Crichton’s partial manuscript!”

I can’t wait for the film. But the book has a glitch in a genetic explanation. It might seem minor, just a few pages, but the entire subplot of a nefarious government cover-up of a biotech disaster unfurls from it.

A Spectacular Hybrid

Patterson penned Kiss the Girls, Along Came a Spider, and sixteen other Alex Cross detective novels, plus Beach House, The Chef, and many more.  Crichton was a fan. I’ve read many of their works.

Michael_Crichton’s output includes The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Congo, Twister, The Lost World, Prey, Sphere, Westworld, and the TV series ER.  He had the top book, film, and TV series within the same week – twice. Crichton had an MD from Harvard Medical School, but he never practiced medicine. He was too busy creating.

When Crichton died of cancer in 2008, he left behind a staggering trove of research about an eruption of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii. His wife, Sherri, knew about Michael’s “volcano project;” they’d visited Pompeii on their honeymoon. After he passed, she found a partial, incomplete manuscript – but she held off seeking a collaborator to finish the project until the perfect person emerged – James Patterson. (See How Michael Crichton’s Widow Sherri Ushered in a Renaissance of His Work With New Book ‘Eruption’ in Variety.)

I can see why Mauna Loa fascinated Crichton. Our family visited Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island many years ago. We walked out on the hot, hardened surface and looked down at rivulets of molten lava, while in the distance fountains of fresh lava spewed into the ocean. Unforgettably, my daughter Heather threw up on the volcano, an early sign of gallbladder disease and to this day, her claim to fame.

Not Just a Volcanic Eruption – Sinister Science, Too

Spoiler alert!

The book is more than an imagining of a natural disaster, like Titanic’s iceberg or the climactic upheaval of The Day After Tomorrow.

The tale opens at the Hilo Botanical Gardens in 2016. Newbie chief plant biologist Rachel Sherrill (named for Crichton’s wife?) is shepherding a bunch of fifth-graders around the park when a serious young fellow asks “Why is this tree turning black?”

Three banyan trees had indeed blackened. Rachel noticed the inky color moving up the trunks and branches. She reported the finding, and soon army jeeps and choppers arrived to evacuate the park. Oddly, the mysterious incident was covered up.

The encroaching stain was, it turned out, a biotech evil. Crichton’s original names for his story were “Vulcan,” “The Black Zone,” and “Black Agent.” Nowadays, of course, Black wouldn’t be used in a title.

A Race Against Nature and Time

The narrative introduces a few too many characters to easily remember.

Protagonist John MacGregor (“Mac”) is a volcanologist. My knowledge of the field is only what I learned in high school earth science and watching Heather barf on the volcano, but I assume his comments are accurate. Throw in conflict with the military and law enforcement; a few renegade pilots; annoying New York Times journalists and celebrities; an Elon Musk-inspired “grandstanding rich man,” Indigenous people and various other locals, and the story of an impending humongous eruption might be enough to sustain interest.

But buried deep inside a cave in the volcano are several canisters containing the agent that blackened the banyan trees – and one canister has sprung a leak. If the contents escape, a chain reaction will ensue when photosynthesis stops, for the goop rapidly kills all plant life. Zipping along food webs the taint will ultimately kill all life on Earth.

What, exactly, is the black material?

In the 1940s, army scientists at a government facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland, began testing chemicals for use as defoliants. Project Hades spawned dioxin, Agent Orange, and the Agent Black of Eruption. But just before field-testing of Agent Black could begin, folks at the facility began noticing that houseplants were dying – all types of plants, turning black. The creeping darkness behaved in an almost infectious manner.

How to contain it?

What to do with the evil black stuff?

The scientists at Fort Detrick mixed in radioactive material with Agent Black, to be able to trace a leak. But the radioactivity, over time, began to decompose the containment materials. When the government yanked funding for safe storage, the dangerous material was moved to cool water pools in a part of Mauna Loa called the Ice Tube.

And there the herbicide sat, until in 2016, workers attempting to repackage and seal the material instead caused a leak. Some of the stuff adhered to the shoes of a worker who neglected to clean himself off properly. As he trekked around the botanical gardens, he killed every living thing that he touched, including the canary-in-the-coal-mine banyan trees and himself.

The Genetic Explanation Doesn’t Work

The narrative returns to the present. At a meeting of bigshots, a geneticist, Adam Lim, describes the contaminant and explains how it will destroy all life on Earth if unleashed. And that’s where the gaff comes in. It’s an oversimplification.

Agent Black mimics a plant hormone. It consists of two insecticides: 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (the familiar 2,4-D) and 4-amino-tetrachlorocolinic acid (Google returns nothing, but this chemical may have an alternative name.) Flies lick the tasty sticky mixture, and digestive enzymes in their guts cut up the two chemicals.

At this point, it was apparently necessary to dredge up the ancient scientist stereotype:

“Mac had met scientists like Lim often in his career. Sometimes he was one of those smart-ass scientists himself. I know things that the rest of you don’t.”

The explanation continues, and here’s where it ceases to make sense, to anyone who knows anything about DNA, genes, and genomes. And for some reason Patterson reverts to longish paragraphs, perpetuating the “science as unfamiliar” stereotype. But I’ll use his signature short sentence style to explain.

Ingesting the insecticides disturbs a fly’s gut microbiome – the bacteria and viruses in it’s digestive system – in a way that increases the number of tobacco mosaic viruses.

TMV is a common pathogen used in early molecular biology research.

Pieces of 2,4-D insecticide stick to the abundant viruses in the fly’s guts, making it sick. The animal excretes, and some of the poop lands on leaves.

(Dr. MacGregor carefully scrutinizes the white poo extruding from the rears of flies in an image projected onto a big screen at the meeting of bigshots.)

Then viruses in the poop enter leaf cells, doing what viruses do and commandeering the cellular DNA replication machinery to make more of themselves.

And here’s where the narrative veers into the impossible.

“Within the plant cell, the 2,4-D fragments are incorporated into the genome of some viruses. When the cell breaks open, these viruses containing the fragment are released into the environment.” The infecting viruses enter cells of other plants, spreading the black death.  

“Even a large tree will die with forty-eight hours,” Lim the geneticist helpfully explains.

BUT WAIT!!!

A plant genome consists of DNA, and NOT pieces of 2,4-D, which is a completely unrelated organic acid. The DNA double helix is exquisitely symmetrical. Remember Watson and Crick’s original 3D model? There’s no space for a molecule that isn’t a DNA nucleotide (building block) to insert.

And so the mechanism behind Agent Black, and therefore the subplot of Eruption, is a house of cards.

This revelation made it challenging to finish the book. I wonder if Crichton intentionally left the mechanism a bit fuzzy and Patterson, not a scientist or physician, attempted to fill in the blanks with some multisyllabic handwaving. Then, nobody checked scientific plausibility.

CODA

Despite the genetic glitch, Eruption will make a fine film, for I suspect most people do not truly care about organic chemistry and genome science. And much of the plot is about figuring out where to place bombs and explosives to divert the coming lava flow – not all characters are privy to the leaking buried biotech canisters. Volcanoes are so fascinating by themselves that sometimes I forgot about the biotech subplot.

In the film, copters will crash into the caldera, the sunken top of a volcano as magma below is displaced. Locals fleeing the coming wave of molten rock will leap into the sea. And perhaps we’ll see a character sitting on the can when a river of lava approaches, like the unfortunate fellow caught on the crapper in Jurassic Park as a hungry T. rex descended.

In the authors’ defense, they adhere to Isaac Asimov’s rule of science fiction: change just one thing. If only they’d added another paragraph to explain how, exactly, a plant cell could manufacture 2,4-D. Deploy CRISPR to carry genes encoding the enzymes to produce the insecticide combo?

Eruption is clearly destined for filmdom. The Los Angeles Times called the book “this summer’s literary version of a blockbuster action movie.” And aside from awakening my latent nightmares of nearly failing organic chemistry, Eruption was a great read.