A team of four specifically chosen scientists were assembled to handle the crisis, each with different fields of study and their own unique specialties. Jeremy Stone, the project leader, was who all the other specialists and government agents looked up to throughout the entire operation. He was a relatively young bacteriologist who had a lengthy list of acclaimations, including winning the nobel prize at age twenty six. Peter Leavitt's field was clinical microbiology and epidemiology. He had a sort of ingrained pessism but was prone to thinking outside of the box. Charles Burton, a pathologist, gained the nickname "The Stumbler" from the way he seemed to inadvertantly "stumble" onto one discovery after another. An unusual fourth choice for Project Wildfire was Mark Hall, a surgeon. Although he had the least experience out of all the scientists when it came to pathogens, his single male status made him the key player in the "odd man hypothesis." This was the tested idea that an unmarried man would be most likely to make the right decision in the event that the Wildfire installation's nuclear device had to be detonated. Should a breakthough of an organism occur with all of level five being contaminated, the timing mechanism for detonation automatically engaged. Unless Hall made it to one of the several substations located at each level within three minutes and insterted a key, the bomb would detonate.
Immediately the team began work and recovered the Scoop satellite from the town in Arizona. While there they found only two survivors, a crying baby and an old derelict, Peter Jackson. The satellite and two survivors were taken to Wildfire where work started with each member focusing on a different aspect of the investigation. Their aim was to single out the organism they recovered and decide exactly how to deal with it.
Through extensive research on the infant and old man, Burton concluded that while there was seemingly nothing wrong with the baby, Jackson had a number of problems. His frail body was anemic and he had suffered from ulcers for two years. To combat his pain he took a bottle of aspirin a day and drank Sterno, a small stove fuel that contained alcohol and methanol. Both the aspirin and Sterno not only made his ulcers worse, but they also worked to raise the overall acidity of his body to toxic proportions.
While Burton continued research on how the microorganism, now code named "Andromeda," was transmitted and caused death, Stone and Leavitt focused on determining the physical nature of the organism. Through complicated testing they determined that it was a unicellular, hexagonal organism with no amino acids or proteins. It converted carbon dioxide and ultraviolet light directly into energy with no excretions of any kind.
Several weeks into the their research, rubber gasket seals suddenly began decomposing, seemingly for no reason. One by one, the sealed labs of the fifth level became open to the Andromeda organism. This set off the countdown for the nuclear device in Wildfire to detonate. Knowing that the organism fed off of energy and wasted nothing, they realized that if the bomb was detonated, the organism would convert the energy to mass and grow exponentially large instead of being wiped out by the blast. With little time to spare and to much avail, Hall was able to make it to a substation with his key and stop the blast.
It was later realized that the rubber gaskets were dissolving because Andromeda spontaneously evolved into a form that was nonpathogenic to humans. The new form simply broke down any polymer it encountered, including the seals. After this, the organism slowly migrated back to the upper levels of the atmosphere, and the rest of the world never heard anything about it.
Looking back, the scientists realized that Andromeda initially killed people by causing an instantaneous clotting of the blood or by hemmoraging the brain's vessel walls. The old man survived because his acidic body proved too toxic for the organism. The infant, on the other hand, survived because its body had become the exact opposite--too basic. The child cried nonstop the night the organism entered the town and he had a high amount of oxygen in the blood. This made the pH level of the infant drop emmensly, and it subsequently saved his life. None of this mattered now, however, since the newly evolved Andromeda didn't effect humans.
Conceptual Analysis
At one point in their study, the team debated what determines whether or not something is living. Does it contain certain substances? Does it act in a certain way? Can life be different than what we have experienced on this earth? The group had finally concluded that energy conversion was the hallmark of life. All living organisms in some way took in energy from food or sunlight and converted it to another form of energy for specific use. Viruses were the exception to this rule, but the group was prepared to define viruses as nonliving.
Leavitt went on to point out that energy conversion could not necessarily define life. He used an example of a black cloth, that when subjected to light, converted light into heat. A watch, which glowed in the dark because of the decay of radium in the dials, also displayed energy conversion. Lastly, he produced a piece of granite, whose life span was so great humans could not even detect changes in it to determine its true state. So the definition of life was amorphous, at best. The definition of life is incredibly important, because biology is the study of living things. Without a clear definition of what the subject matter is, it isn't always easy knowing what exactly one is studying.
Another biological concept discussed was the symbiotic relationship between man and the microorganisms that inhabit his body. Crichton described a fictional drug named Kalocin that targeted and destroyed any organisms in the body that was unicellular or less. It killed "the virus of polio, rabies, leukemia, and the common wart. Kalocin also killed bacteria. And fungi. And parasites." During a one month testing of cancer patients, all subjects showed significant improvement with no side effects. When they stopped their testing, however, all volunteers were dead within six hours. The patients in the novel all died in strange and bizzare circumstances, such as one man dying from a swelling of his body, head to foot. Another man had his stomach eaten away, while yet another had his brain dissolved into a jelly. Over millions of years man has evolved with the countless number of microorganisms in his body. When you totally obliterate this relationship, you undue the evolutionary work of centuries. The drug basically set the subjects immune system back to square one, before any coeveolution could take place.
Crichton also mentions something called "The Messenger Theory", a possible method of interstellar communication. When trying to communicate between two distant galaxies, radio waves are much too slow and fade too quickly. Video signals are even less effective. A method that more intelligent life might employ would be to grow a number of microorganisms that would grow uninhibited in the vastness of space. The alien race would send them out in random directions where they would drift perpetually until finally reaching other life. Once reaching their destination, they would develop into full organ, or organism capable of communication. They would inform the other race of the presence of the other, and possible ways to communicate back. This seemed amusing to the more practical scientists, but it had to be considered a possibility with Andromeda.
Overall, "The Andromeda Strain's" extremely technical subject matter made it challenging to read, but informative on a level usually not touched on by other science fiction novels. The plot itself as well as the concepts conveyed in this book make it relevent to the modern biologic world, even over 30 years later.
