Overall an enjoyable book from Crichton. Great narration from Dylan Baker on the audiobook. Interesting satirical take for his final book published in his lifetime. It was a bit confusing with the multiple short stories strung together, but there were some fun characters like the Parrot Named Gerard and Trans species monkey boy named Dave. There was a weird part that had a creepy pedo tone at cedar point, and I think it was similar scene in State of Fear too, not sure what was up with those. But it was enjoyable and a fairly easy read. 3/5

Summary:

Frank Burnet has contracted an aggressive form of leukemia, and undergoes intensive treatment and four years of semiannual checkups. He later learned the checkups were a pretext for researching the genetic basis of his unusually successful response to treatment, and the physician's university had sold the rights to Frank's cells to BioGen, a biotechnology startup company. Frank sues the university for unauthorized misuse of his cells, but the trial judge rules that the cells were "waste" and that the university could dispose of them as it wished. Frank's lawyers advise that the university, as a tax-funded organization, can still claim the rights to the cells under the doctrine of eminent domain.

Venture capitalist "Jack" Watson conspires to steal or sabotage BioGen's cultures of Frank's cells. As part of his terms for financing BioGen, Watson forced the company to accept his nephew Brad Gordon as its security chief. After Brad's carelessness nearly allows one of Watson's sabotage attempts to succeed, the company takes advantage of Brad's attraction to teenage girls, and engineers his being accused and convicted of raping a minor. Watson's price for providing a defense lawyer is that Brad must contaminate BioGen's cultures. Brad's lawyer plans to claim in defense that Brad has a gene for recklessness and instructs him to engage in various high-risk activities. As a result, Brad gets into a fight with two martial arts experts and is shot by the police.

After Brad's sabotage, BioGen consults lawyers, who advise that under United States law they have the rights to all of Frank's cell line and thus the right to extract replacement cells, by force if necessary, from Frank or any of his descendants. When Frank goes on the run, BioGen hires bounty hunter Vasco Borden to obtain such cells, regardless of whether the donors consent. Vasco plans to snatch Frank's grandson Jamie from his school but is foiled by Jamie's mother Alex, whom he tries to seize instead. After escaping, Alex and Jamie also go on the run.

Henry Kendall, a researcher at another biotech company, finds that his illegal introduction of human genes into a chimpanzee years before while working at the NIH primate research facility unexpectedly produced a transgenic chimpanzee, who can talk and whose behavior is generally childlike but reverts to chimpanzee patterns under stress. The agency intends to destroy the chimp-boy, Dave, in order to cover up the unauthorized experiment, but Henry sneaks him out of the lab. Henry's wife Lynn opposes bringing Dave into their home, but their son, also named Jamie, becomes close friends with him. Lynn becomes Dave's most determined defender and, to explain Dave's odd appearance, publishes online reports of a fictitious genetic disease. She grooms him as a senior female would groom a young chimpanzee in the wild. Dave is sent to the same school as Jamie and gets into trouble after biting the leader of a gang of bullies who attack Jamie. The chimp-boy becomes increasingly isolated at school; academically, he is backward in some areas such as writing, while in sports, his classmates regard him as unfair competition.

Paris-based animal behavior researcher Gail Bond finds that her two-year-old grey parrot, Gerard, into which human genes were injected while he was a chick, has been helping her son produce near-perfect homework. While she is testing Gerard's abilities, the bird becomes bored and mimics the voices and other sounds of her husband having sex in their home with another woman. After a quarrel, Gail's husband, an investment banker, gives Gerard as a "money can't buy this" present to an influential and lecherous client. The client finds Gerard an embarrassment and passes him on to another owner, and so on. Eventually, Gerard ends up in the hands of Stan Milgram, who loses patience with Gerard's loquacity while delivering the parrot to yet another owner three days' drive away and leaves the bird by the roadside. Gerard flies off, in search of more pleasant surroundings.

After a few more narrow escapes, Alex and Jamie head for the home of Lynn, who happens to be a childhood friend. Vasco anticipates this move and tries to snatch Jamie – but abducts Lynn's son Jamie instead. Dave saves Lynn's Jamie, biting off Vasco's ear and damaging the ambulance in which Vasco planned to extract the tissue samples. However, Vasco's associate snatches Alex's son while everyone is celebrating the rescue of Lynn's. While the hunt is going on, Biogen's lawyers apply for a warrant to arrest Alex, on the grounds that she had stolen the company's property, namely her and her son's cells. She has to go straight from the fight to the courtroom, where her lawyer outplays Biogen's, and the judge adjourns to check details of the relevant laws and precedents overnight. Alex and Henry discover that Alex's son is being moved to a private clinic where the tissue samples are to be taken. As they move in to retrieve him, Gerard, now a resident of the clinic's gardens, reminds Jamie to shout for his mother, who rescues him. Vasco gives up after Dave attacks him, and Alex threatens him with a shotgun. The next day the judge rules in Alex's favor and rejects the precedents as attempts to abolish normal human feelings by decree, a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which forbids slavery. The ruling will likely hamper research in the long run, and prevent patients from selling their tissues rather than donating them for research.

Gerard is welcomed into Lynn's home. After he mimics telephone dial tones Lynn contacts Gail, and he is reunited with her. Press commentators praise the household as a trend-setting inter-species transgenic family, and Henry is honored by some scientific organizations.

In other plot threads:

BioGen researcher Josh Winkler's drug-addicted brother, Adam, accidentally exposes himself to a "maturity" gene that the company is developing for the control of irresponsible and addictive behavior. After Adam reforms within a few days, their mother pressures Josh to administer the gene to friends and relatives who also behave irresponsibly. By the end of the book all of his rat and human subjects die of accelerated old age.
The staff at a hospital provide samples from corpses for use by unscrupulous relatives in lawsuits, sell corpses' bones for medical uses, and destroy records and samples to cover their tracks.
Henry Kendall's boss Dr. Robert Bellarmino, a mediocre scientist but skillful manipulator, is also a lay preacher and slants his comments to journalists, schoolchildren and politicians according to whether his audience has religious or pro-science inclinations. He is ultimately shot by Brad Gordon at an amusement park. Ironically, Bellarmino was only at the park to look for people who might have the gene for recklessness, and Gordon was only there to bolster the evidence for his lawyer's case that he has the gene.
An orangutan in Sumatra becomes famous for its ability to speak obscene statements in Dutch and French. An adventurer overdoses the orangutan with tranquillizer while trying to capture it, and has to give it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. As a result, the orangutan catches the adventurer's cold and dies from a respiratory infection. An expert who dissects its corpse finds that its throat is very human-like but concludes from the shape of its skull that its brain is pure orangutan.
An avant garde artist uses genetic modification to change the appearance of animals, while another self-named "artist/biologist" is falsely accused of modifying turtles so that females laying eggs are less vulnerable to predators because the turtles' genetically engineered bioluminescence attracts tourists. An advertising agency proposes to make genetically engineered animals and plants carry advertisements, and claims that this would be a very effective conservation strategy.
Billionaire "Jack" Watson becomes the victim of an extremely aggressive form of genetic cancer, and is very nearly unable to receive treatment due to others' patents on the relevant genes, giving Watson "a taste of his own medicine". He eventually procures experimental treatment, which fails to save his life.
In a meeting, several prominent US Senators begin discussing various issues related to genetic modification, and realize that the science is outpacing the ability of the political system to introduce laws dealing with it.
The book also features news reports, many about the genetics of blondes and of Neanderthals. These two themes combine into reports that Neanderthals were the first blondes, were more intelligent than Cro-Magnon humans and interbred with Cro-Magnons out of pity, and that "cavemen preferred blondes". At one point three successive reports feature a scientist's press release that Neanderthals had a gene that made them both behaviorally conservative and ecologically conservationist, an environmentalist's interpretation of that press release that modern humans need to learn from the Neanderthals lest they too become extinct, and a business columnist's interpretation that over-caution caused the Neanderthals' extinction.

A parrot excelling at mathematics. A talking monkey. Powerful firms from the pharma industry. Genetics hackers. Property rights of cell lines. The topic is very interesting, but Crichton’s book lacks focus, does not follow a clear thread, has a very lose plot and does not contain any compelling character.

I haven't read many good reviews of this book so I went into it with pretty low expectations, which I think helped. The biggest problem with this book is that it has no plot. Most chapters are only a few pages long and in most chapters new characters are introduced. There are a few recurring characters, but mostly we just get snippets. What we're looking at is what the world would be like if genetic engineering was successful and commonplace. What would happen if we could really put human genes into animals--could we create a cross between a human and a chimpanzee? Should we? What if we could modify the genes of wild animals so they would display logos for big companies--then those companies could "sponsor" animals and they'd be less likely to go extinct. If we could find the gene for drug addiction, could we fix it? Could we sue our parents for passing on to us defective genes? If your husband had a gene that predisposes him to infidelity, could he really be blamed for sleeping around? What if companies could patent genes? Would they then own the genes that we all carry in all of our cells? Would they have the right to retrieve those genes any time they want? This is just a book of what-ifs, no real plot, but I still found it to be somewhat entertaining. At the end I was annoyed by the author's note that repeats back the author's main points, in case you didn't get them in the story. If these sort of questions interest you, I'd recommend reading this, but if they don't, feel free to skip this.

Oops! Finished this yesterday and forgot to review!

I enjoyed this book even though it was a bit spastic. Basically, Michael Crichton learned everything he could about the state of gene research and politics and combined it into a series of fictional stories to make separate points. Some of the stories ended up crossing and some did not. If you read this, don't expect any cohesion, just appreciate the anecdotes within.

Crichton writes satire, and the general perception of him does not accept this. I learned quite a bit from reading it. I did not know that genes can be patented, human tissues can be used in any way by whomever happens to end up with them, and that gene testing results can be hidden in such a way that deaths have been covered up because they were "trade secrets". Crichton shows the extreme possibilities of these insane laws.

In Next, a man has a gene that could be a groundbreaking cure, but when the company that has the patent for it is sabotaged and loses all its samples it believes it is within its rights to hire bounty hunters to track down this man's daughter and grandson and surgically take some of their genes since they are the company's property. This is just one story that intersects the others in Next. Oh, by the way, there is a transgenic chimpanzee-human in the book. I'm sure there are countless worse scientific experiments going on that makes the chimpanzee-human seem like nothing.

While surveillance gets scarier and scarier are we actually being watched all the time like in 1984? No, but if you're someone big brother is interested in, yes. Satire, by definition, is trafficking in exaggeration to warn people about where we are going.

I thought this read was good for several reasons. The character development was interesting in a simple way. The plot and story line were both comical and impressive for the fact that the story's premise is just as much feasible as it is exaggerated for the dramatic purpose and entertaining, intriguing effect! A bit disturbing when we consider the scientific, moral and ethical extremes that it portrays! All in all I would recommend it for those of us who enjoy S.F., action, scandal and drama. The possibilities of actual occurrences as such, was also a bit disturbing. The fact that animals could be used and altered from their natural states, that genes could be not so much studied as manipulated and distorted. Gives the idea that the entire natural world hangs in the balance of being affected negatively by man and science. Interesting but dangerous ideas without proper knowledge and wisdom as our guides!

Mr. Crichton does it again! Loved the science behind this book. He makes it easy to understand and very accessible. Definitely recommend this one.

Michael Crichton was a master storyteller, the author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, but this book is a real dud. It's all about the politics of gene manipulation, patenting genes etc., and it comes off as a treatise on how scientists, the government, doctors and ordinary people should all act when it comes to gene science. It doesn't help that the epilogue adds another 8 or 10 pages of lecturing. The characters came off as two-dimensional, having to make such weighty speeches, and the talking animals strained credibility.

The Good: A fantastic premise, as always, from Crichton. Fact based, with completely terrifying implications, Next takes science today to that "next" step. If furthers things just a bit more, the ramifications of which give the readers a lot of troubling thoughts to consider.

The Bad: Crichton lost me at the money. Apparently, if you mix human and monkey DNA, a monkey will be born with human vocal capabilities. A monkey that you can pass off as a child with a hairy birth defect and some impulse control issues. The fact that this monkey was able to fool more than one person in this book was just ludicrous. I had a hard time taking anything seriously in the book after that.

It is a scientific thriller that tells about genetics.
Although I'm not familiar with science nor genetics in particular, yet it seems that Crichton did an excellent job in his scientific explanations.

Two main drawbacks in the book-
First of all, you have to be patient because Crichton is overly exaggerating with the scientific descriptions and genealogy articles that appear in each chapter.
Second, the book has many characters, and finally, only at the end of all things, everything connects, so it's a little hard to follow.

 Nevertheless, the result is satisfactory in my opinion - it is a fascinating thriller.

I hated this book and only gave it two stars rather than one because it was easy to read. It took ages to read because it was a big hardback that was not easily transportable in a handbag but also because there was no plot to speak of and most of the characters were so vile i really didn't care enough about any of them to bother reading much of this book at a time.

Consisting of a countless number of disparate 'threads', all with the common theme of genetics and genetic engineering, there didn't seem to be an overarching thread. Instead the novel was an opportunity for Crichton to show off his scientific knowledge - except there was no way of knowing what was fact and what was fiction without embarking on my own research. Again, i didn't care enough to do that...

Most of the characters were male, with women generally demoted to role of sexy secretary or eye candy in the office. Quite sexist at times this felt like a 'man's book' which is unusual as I would never say that a book should be suitable for only one gender (similar in this way to The End of the World Running Club).

The most disappointing part of the book was the end - i was expecting a conclusion where things were tied up and issues were resolved. If you read this book, don't make the same mistake I did. The book will end and you will be confused and let down!

This is classic Michael Crichton. I love his stories and how he intermingle science within a fictional novel. The story deals with the ethics and stories associated with bio genetics. There is a long cast of characters and the author ties them together in the end (which is probably a little too far fetched). However, it is a great way (for me) to get lost in an amazing world that Michael has a way of putting together. I am sad that he has passed away and will no longer be able to gift the world with his creativity.