In order to retrieve a sample of the organism, two of the scientists go to Piedmont in protective suits. And because they are studying a potentially lethal organism, the facility contains enough safety protocols to make sure that it never gets out – including a nuclear device in case of widespread contamination in the facility. He is taken by armed guards to a super-secret facility in the Nevada desert where he, along with the other scientists in the group, are supposed to study the organism to help prevent its spread. Berkeley campus and told of the potential threat. Jeremy Stone is interrupted from a party on the U.C. As the mastermind behind the Wildfire initiative and the defacto leader of the group, we see as Dr.
The ‘crack’ team includes four world-renown scientists, each with his own specialty: a bacteriologist, a disease pathologist, an infection vectors specialist, and a surgeon – sort of a “Dream Team” if you will. Wildfire, we learn, is a government sponsored team of scientists that is ready at a moment’s notice to convene in the event of a possible extraterrestrial biological infestation. Suspecting that the satellite might have returned to Earth with some sort of extraterrestrial organism, they activate the ‘Wildfire’ initiative, which was designed for the sole purpose of responding to this sort of potentially catastrophic event. After radio communication with the men is lost abruptly, an aerial survey of the town seems to show that everyone is dead. As the real story begins, we open on a scene of two military men scouting out a remote city in the Arizona desert (Piedmont) where they are looking for a crashed satellite.
The unseen narrator only hints at the severity and nature of what is in the report, but does stop to acknowledge both the heroic actions of the people involved and the fatal mistakes they make along the way. The book starts out with a forward that introduces the events that follow in the form of a classified report.
With his vast medical and technical knowledge (having attended Harvard Medical School), he is able to imbue the events in the novel, and the actions of his protagonists, with an authenticity and scientific accuracy that makes it seem less like a work of fiction and more like an actual report of actual events (which is exactly what he’s going for). But what makes this book so unnerving and nail biting isn’t just the unique nature of the threat, it’s how realistic and plausible Crichton makes it seem. And what better way to scare the bejeezus out of readers than to introduce a terrifying new threat to humanity. While the idea of a deadly virus spreading across the world and infecting humanity may be a commonplace idea in science fiction novels and movies these days, at the time Michael Crichton published his seminal novel The Andromeda Strain, the idea that an unknown microorganism could potentially cause mass casualties on a global scale was relatively new.