Because sometimes works of fiction can provide lessons useful in real-life situations, it’s worth looking back at perhaps the first great bestseller about a possible pandemic, Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain.
In doing so, allow me to further elaborate a point I made in my most recent column, namely that we should be wary both of underreacting and overreacting to the current contagion. Sometimes overreacting, in particular, can turn a tragedy into a full-fledged catastrophe.
With a heavy “spoiler alert” warning — in other words, if you want to read The Andromeda Strain for yourself, and don’t want to know the ending, then stop reading this column — let’s consider Crichton’s insights. Again, Andromeda is of course fiction, but it is fiction so realistic, and so grounded in science, that, like other good fiction, its lessons can be valid even if its story isn’t real.
The first thing to contemplate is Crichton’s “odd man hypothesis,” which posited that at least one member of a crisis response team should be a nonconformist, someone whose mind and will are not easily controllable by others. In this case, the odd man was the one given the only key to stop a self-destruct mechanism that otherwise would immolate the entire facility where the dangerous pathogen was being studied. If sensors indicated the pathogen was escaping into open atmosphere, the facility’s destruction would be automatic, unless the “odd man” turned the key to stop it.
The second idea was that great expertise can also carry with it an arrogance that might create blind spots. As in: “It was a peculiarity of the [scientific crisis response] team that, despite the individual brilliance of team members, the group grossly misjudged their information at several points … Their ultimate error would be a compound of a dozen small clues that were missed.”
The third idea is a warning against overreacting. The facility was designed to implode by means of a nuclear reaction which, it was thought, would kill any pathogen. What the fictional anti-pandemic planners didn’t anticipate was that this particular pathogen “directly convert(ed) energy to matter” so that the energy from an “atomic blast” would make it replicate exponentially rather than destroy it. The fail-safe self-destruct mechanism was thus a worse threat than the untreated pathogen itself.
In the end, the Andromeda pathogen mutated on its own so that it would no longer be dangerous to humans — except for the fact that as it found a way to escape the facility in which it was held, the facility’s self-destruct mechanism was about to nuke it into exponential expansion, with the chance to mutate again into something far deadlier than before.
The only thing that could stop it would be the designated “odd man,” who had three minutes to navigate a gamut of ladders, choking gas, and poison darts, to reach the place where he could turn the key to stop the facility’s atomic self-destruction.
Of course, the odd man made it. As only the odd man, the free-willed man, could.
All of which leads us… where?
Well, it should make us wary of reacting to a contagion in ways that do more harm than good. It should make us welcome some cussedly independent thinkers and actors who challenge our assumptions. And it should make us willing to repeatedly question, at least hypothetically, the directives of “experts,” even as we know we should follow the experts’ advice unless we find truly compelling reasons not to.
The Andromeda Strain ends with a postscript, by way of ironic warning, that has policymakers, while reviewing existing protocols, deferring to scientists by saying that “the decision is out of our hands.” Crichton clearly wants us to recoil from that idea. In a country of free men, the decisions are never out of our hands.
