The Andromeda Strain
Well-known visionary author, Michael Crichton, was no slouch when came to grounding for his novels. Unfailingly, he transports us lock, stock and barrel into meticulously accurate settings. In Timeline, it is 14th century medieval France. In The Great Train Robbery – it is with criminal masterminds in Victorian London. In The Lost World – with biologists in a Costa Rican tropical jungle. For Timeline he researched 91 works on the Middle Ages and quantum physics.
Fear of the next pandemic has spawned numerous fictional works projecting worse-case scenarios. Whereas in Contagion, 2011, experts apply themselves to the delivery of a vaccine, in an earlier film, The Andromeda Strain, a 1971 blockbuster – the world was smitten by its realism and relevance – its experts follow a different course of reasoning.
Two years earlier, Michael Crichton had written a novel hoping to pay off his medical student loans. From his thorough knowledge of human pathology, using medical and scientific facts Crichton introduces an alien contagion into a real-world scenario which has striking parallels to ours in 2020. Dr. Hall and a specialized team are trying, in a desperate race against mass infection and nuclear detonation, to save themselves … and humanity.
In the scene below, Dr. Hall describes the narrow pH range in which the Andromeda Strain thrives, then proposes…
We’ll alkalinize his blood.. Do you have anything? … Bicarbonate of soda?°.
Author and medical doctor, Michael Crichton, was well aware how to make the blood more alkaline.
Interestingly, a1990 Journal of Virology research article shows how CORONAVIRUSES ALSO only thrive within a very narrow pH range. (See post ‘Coronaviruses are EXQUISITELY pH Sensitive’) Time to apply the bicarbs!
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