The Andromeda Strain – Flashcards

Physical Description: Young, mind 30's Personality: This character is the leader of Project Wildfire. Imperious and conceited, he is nonetheless brilliant, and a man of conscience. He has a tendency to treat his Wildfire colleagues as his intellectual inferiors. Background: Dr. Stone is a Nobel prize-winning scientist and the acknowledged leader of the Project Wildfire team. In 1963, Stone wrote a letter to the President concerning the possibility of alien bacteria infecting earth aboard returning American satellites. Based on his ideas, the government organized a protocol for disinfecting all men and equipment returning from space. Stone also formed a committee that submitted a Life Analysis Protocol, which detailed the way any living thing could be studied. This protocol resulted in the construction of the Project Wildfire facility in Flatrock, Nevada. When the lab was completed and a group of five scientists needed to be selected to study new organisms, Stone was an obvious choice. Although he is pleased to see the government adopt his ideas, he does not realize that he is being used in the hopes that he can help the military advance its development of biological weapons. Role: Professor of Bacteriology at the University of California at Berkeley; a Nobel Prize winner.

Physical Description: sloppy and unkempt appearance Personality: Smart and not careful Background: A fifty-four year old pathologist and professor at Baylor medical school. He made his reputation working on various strains of the staphylococcus virus before eventually being brought on to the project. Burton has a brilliant mind, but is rather lackluster as a physical specimen. Stone is constantly annoyed with his sloppy and unkempt appearance. While working in the pathology lab he makes a series of critical mistakes, which delay the discovery of Andromeda's nature. Role: Professor of pathology at the Baylor College of Medicine

Physical Description: Wise and old Personality: He is reserved and intelligent Background: A clinical microbiologist trained to treat infectious disease. He has seen enough plagues and epidemics to know the importance of quick action. Leavitt recruited Hall to the project in 1966, while they were working at the same hospital - Leavitt was the Chief of Bacteriology. Although Stone has the most confidence in him, Leavitt ultimately proves the most unreliable of the team members. He fails to disclose his history of epileptic seizures brought on by flashing lights. During the climax of the novel, when the bacterium is spreading throughout the Wildfire facility, Leavitt is incapacitated by seizures and spends the remainder of the novel in the infirmary. Role: Clinical microbiologist; suffers from epilepsy

Physical Description: Young, mid 30's Personality: This character is the only practicing surgeon among them. He risks his own life to stop the self-destruction sequence from completing its deadly mission. Background: Of all the Wildfire scientists, Dr. Hall pays it the least amount of attention. He agreed to join the team in 1966 when approached by Leavitt, but did not follow the updates he was given and doubted anything would ever come of the project. His inattention to the details annoyed Leavitt, and Stone felt that Hall's surgical abilities would be of little if any help at the facility. In actuality, Hall had not been Stone's first choice, but was brought on in a compromise with army officials. He was the last person notified of the incident at Piedmont and the least well informed about the Flatrock installation. Much of what the reader learns about Project Wildfire comes from explanations designed to get Dr. Hall up to speed. Role: Medical doctor and surgeon

Physical Description: old, not really especifide in the book. Personality: not mentioned in the book Background: In the hospital because he is sick in the hospital. Role: Anthropologist and electrolytes specialist; does not participate in Wildfire project due to illness

Physical Description: Old and sick Personality: Crazy and useful for information Background: The old man from Piedmont, that seems so mysterious at first, turns out to be the key to unlocking the Andromeda mystery. Stone and Burton transport Jackson as only one of two survivors to the Wildfire facility where Hall studies him overall the next few days. Jackson has a chronic bleeding ulcer, which he treats by downing a bottle of aspirin a day and following it up with Sterno. This makes his blood extremely acidic and helps him survive through the Andromeda Strain contamination. Jackson helps identify the baby survivor and recounts what happened in Piedmont on the night the satellite landed. Role: Survivor of the Andromeda Strain

The action starts out in the small town of Piedmont Arizona, which has been decimated by an unknown bacterium. Afterwards, the scene shifts to an underground government laboratory in Flat rock Nevada. The rest of the story takes place here as scientists try to unlock the mystery of the Andromeda strain. Because the story takes place in the late sixties, it is influenced by several aspects from the Cold War, including the ramifications of using nuclear weapons and the anti-military attitudes that were coming during the American involvement in Vietnam.

This book is a classic science fiction struggle between man and nature.

Everything that happens from the initial incident up to the moment where Hall makes his "highway diagnosis".

Find the baby and the old man alive

Find everybody dead in a town

Plane crash.

The action intensifies briefly as Hall attempts to enter the core and climb to the fourth level in order to enter his key and press the button to inactivate the boom.

The disease is gone.

In this book the author uses marxist criticism in order to give an over all view of the power that the government has over people. This affects my view of the novel because the government does not have enough power to control people as shown in the novel.

New technology at that time such as space satellites, powerful computers, and atomic weapons are extensively used to symbolize man's intelligence.

The Andromeda strain itself can be said to symbolize man's ignorance because the disease could in no way be controlled by humans, even with all their technology.

Heroism and Intelligence In his acknowledgements, Crichton describes the story of the Andromeda Strain as a "chronicle of heroism and intelligence." Although the scientists make many mistakes, they do pursue their task with courage and tenacity. In the first place, they show foresight in even envisioning the possibility of an alien bacteria coming to earth in a returning satellite. Stone in particular is a visionary because he is one of the few scientists who take seriously Rudolph Karp's claim to have discovered bacteria in meteorites. During the crisis, the scientists go about their tasks with logic and precision. They are relentless in their pursuit of knowledge, getting little sleep during the four days the crisis lasts. At no point do they panic or behave unprofessionally, even though they are exposing themselves to great potential danger, as the crisis involving Burton when a seal breaks shows. Also, if the facility becomes contaminated, the atomic self-destruct mechanism will be activated and they will all die. As they work they utilize every scrap of scientific and medical knowledge they have in order to understand an organism that is unlike anything they have encountered before. Hall in particular shows heroism in his last-gasp effort to save the facility from atomic self-destruction. In spite of the effects of poison gas and poison darts he forces himself to reach the substation and turn his key

One major theme of The Andromeda Strain is how intelligence of man can lead to his downfall. In the novel, the United States government had come up with the technology to put man made devices into Earth's orbit to collect data on outer space. This demonstrates man's great intelligence, but ultimately the new technology leads to an unprecedented crisis. On the other hand, this intelligence of man can also be interpreted as ignorance. While the team of scientists in the novel were of the most intelligent people in the world, when it came to the Andromeda Strain, they were just as ignorant as any other person. That is, until they began researching it, but ultimately, the Andromeda strain was in control. This is because humans had never experienced such an organism as the Andromeda Strain. Having been written during the Cold War, The Andromeda Strain clearly states a theme on the ramifications of the use of atomic weapons. There are two instances in the novel where men choose to resort to atomic weapons to try to solve their problems. The first instance is when Jeremy Stone suggests Piedmont be nuked in order to prevent Andromeda from spreading. The second example is the Wildfire research facility which is rigged with a nuclear self-destruct device as a last resort to an outbreak. If either of these bombs were to actually detonate, there would not only be the destruction caused by the explosion, but (unknown to the scientists) the Andromeda strain would have fed off of the huge amount of released energy and become exceptionally more potent. This exemplifies the theme that resorting to the use of atomic weapons is wrong.

The book's prominent theme is the danger that man's intelligence poses to himself. Man is capable of inventing all sorts of ways to destroy the planet, but not rational enough to control these means. Crichton believes that man's capacity for critical thinking breaks down too easily under stress. In the book, the army succeeds in bringing an alien bacterium to earth in the hopes of supplementing its biological weapons program. But once the "Scoop" satellite lands, the army cannot control the bacteria and its wipes out an entire town.

The archetype in the this novel is Hall because he was the hero because he deactivated the boom.

In this novel the use of tragedy was an important tool that the author used in order to explain the events throughout the novel.

^http://thebestnotes.com/booknotes/Andromeda_Strain_Crichton/Andromeda_Strain_Study_Guide02.html ^http://www.bookrags.com/lessonplan/andromeda-strain/characters.html ^http://www.novelguide.com/The-Andromeda-Strain/themeanalysis.html ^http://andromedastrain.wikispaces.com/Symbols+and+Themes