Next (2006)

Next is a 2006 satirical science fiction novel by American writer Michael Crichton. It was the fifteenth novel under his own name and his twenty-fifth overall, and the last to be published during his lifetime. It follows a number of characters, including transgenic animals, as they try to survive in a world dominated by genetic research, corporate greed, and legal interventions.

Plot

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 part of the attempt at proving this, 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.