Six Signs You Should Explore Growth with Healthcare Buyers

Posted on December 3, 2023 by flybrand1976

Originally posted to LinkedIn. Full list of 17 LinkedIn articles – all are found here at this blog as well.

Everybody wants to live longer and feel better, nobody enjoys seeing another human suffering or in pain. Demand for products that help create healthier, longer lives will continue to grow. If you’re producing an industrial good these markets are always enticing – but they are scary to enter. The regulatory alphabet soup is complex, the fear of product recalls is real. The accelerated growth, higher margin, and greater customer lock-in is offset by higher quality costs, greater warranty reserves, and increased labor costs.

With current global macroeconomic uncertainty, interest rate volatility, and confusion – everyone is looking for ways to grow. Here are six signs that healthcare supply chains might be a good area to explore.

6/ There’s a Clear Goal

Plans work best with a clear goal, for example – “This product will lower the cost of production for mABs (proteins) by a factor of four, so we want it in lab scale pilots with CDMOs in four years, leading to scale production in 2030.” This clarity can continue, “given the bill of materials for the production system, we can sell at [$s] leading to revenue and EBITDA of [$s].”

This clarity is crucial in working backwards to identifying the gaps to where you are today. Without clarity, the goal is to create clarity. Once you have that big end goal identified, you’ll find that the product that can hit that goal will also be valuable in many other interim markets that can turn an attractive long term healthcare product goal into an even larger nearer term goal with applicability in other higher quality industries.

If your product improves profitability for proteins in healthcare, it’s going to do the same for food, beverage and water. Industrial enzyme, nutraceutical, and cosmetic products will also benefit. It starts with that big goal, because that’s what will guide your development and documentation efforts.

If the best goal you can come up with is, “hey, we’d like to make more money” – then that’s not specific enough. Know how your product improves ROI for specific products and have an understanding of the long term outlook for that product.

5/ You’ve Got Time

Healthcare markets take time. Procurement teams are desperate for new vendors, but they are also cautious in managing new entrants that scale up will take a while. This often leads to a whipsaw, where shortly after qualification demand moves from “far in the future” to, “we need a lot now.”

It’s important that a business can manage itself through the evaluation and adoption phase. This can be done by laddering your way into the market and addressing interim markets with faster adoption curves while waiting on healthcare penetration. If you need revenue next quarter, then that is too short of a time horizon to make entry into healthcare supply chain part of your planning.

4/ Your QMS is Good Enough

“Will the team have to wear hairnets? Does this mean we’ll have to be an FDA registered site?” Your production team will have many legitimate question before beginning this journey. Confusion about GMPs and HACCPs will grow before they become a comfortable part of life once you’re in production.

Your quality management system (“QMS”) does not have to be perfect on day 1. These supply chains are growing and they need vendors – your goal is to be top half, and then top quartile – not top 10% from day one. A big part of the initial process is knowing when to admit you don’t know what your gaps fully are, and when to provide more clarity.

For industrial businesses that depend on trade secrets and shop floor know-how in their production process, the degree of transparency required by a healthcare audit team can be nerve-wracking. The end regulators – most often the FDA or EMA, require a degree of transparency far beyond what can be practiced in the automotive or microelectronic supply chains. Many vendors fall apart at this stage and kill their pipeline by refusing to provide the needed transparency in order for supplier auditors to coach them up.

3/ Reference Documentation Exists

Going back to the example in #6, if you’re going to be part of a protein supply chain, your product will benefit from a validation guide – commercial / technical documentation used for the production of therapeutics (example from Pall’s Supor membranes).

Your buyer won’t expect you to have all of that information on day 1, but just as with your QMS, you need to be working towards the goal. Like a tourist learning a new language, fluency isn’t required – but a good guest knows basic communication in the local language.

A trap that many businesses fall into when entering into more tightly regulated markets is that they try to stair-step into the product. For example, if they want to be in healthcare, they plan first to enter food, then beverage, then cosmetics, then nutraceuticals, and then finally get to healthcare. The vision is one of sequential market entry, adding capabilities as gaps become known.

This stair-step approach fails because it takes too long and chews up too much cash as the long adoption cycles in each market consume time. Investors lose faith because of a lack of clarity and nearer term opportunities create distractions for management.

Instead, the team must build a ladder – whereby they know the top rung and the entire build out of the right QMS and documentation is known from the outset. By having an integrated device – the ladder – as opposed to a bespoke construction project (is it a spiral staircase? how big are the steps?), the team is able to march towards the end documentation goals of the highest level of documentation while clearing the expectations of lower quality / compliance expectations in earlier markets.

If we’re using Moore’s Crossing the Chasm as a framework and apply his bowling pin analogy – the top rung is like the back pin. We won’t hit it first, but we’ve got to know that knocking it over is part of our goal in creating a high score.

2/ There is a Reference Account

For many high tech and industrial good vendors with good basic documentation there is already a healthcare buyer in their portfolio. These industries have brilliant people and ample funding – if your product solves a problem, they will find you. Early in the product life cycle a clever engineer, physician or plant manager saw how the product could produce better patient outcome and integrated the product into their processes and products.

Somewhere in the company a helpful customer service or sales team member helped them get their additional documentation needs completed. These buyers are probably known as “difficult” and are paradoxically often cited as reasons that the company cannot formally enter healthcare markets, “because we know how difficult those guys are.”

Often times this reference account is often asking for additional help, regular audits, and much greater visibility into quality processes and raw materials selection. They never complain about price increases or non-recoverable engineering (“NRE”) fees, because they’ve built a whole set of shadow QMS infrastructure for the product within their organization to keep the vendor in compliance. There is great lock-in.

The key then is to re-engineer these relationships socially – to go with hat in hand and enlist their coaching to be a better vendor. It is easy for this to be met with skepticism by the buyer – they’ve trained you up, they get the benefit of your product – now the last thing they want is to enable you to go to their competition. If you can grow the business with this reference account, that is the first place to begin the journey.

1/ Healthcare Supply Chain is Trying to Buy It

A great CRM tool is used to make your sales team more effective – that doesn’t always happen. With increased pressure to perform and greater macroeconomic uncertainty, a canny account manager learns to enter into the tool the kinds of opportunities that are truly sellable. The information within your CRM becomes a subset of what your account managers are willing to spend time on.

“We keep getting calls about whether the product can meet these FDA claims – and I know those take forever to answer, so I just tell them ‘No’ and don’t put it in the CRM.”

Your Account Manager When Asked About Healthcare Opportunities

These are the answers you’ll hear if your product is a fit for this market when you talk with your AMs. They know the product can work – but without the right corporate infrastructure, they don’t get paid to persuade you to address these gaps, they’ve already got enough day to day pressure. The answer is to start looking at the documentation gaps mentioned above in [3] and to pick a few of the more enthusiastic AMs to go back and call some of the accounts they’d previously said “no” to.

You’ll be surprised to learn of accounts with sophisticated purchasing teams that have been trying to buy your products year after year, because their growth forces them to constantly pursue new vendors. By finding ways to say “yes” to these buyers where you don’t break the bank by incurring high up front costs, you can quickly put your products on a path to being in higher growth, higher margin healthcare markets with high lock-in.

Often, when the ‘Reference Account’ from (2) is not exactly in healthcare, but in a technically adjacent space, that can be enough for healthcare supply chains to start exploring use of the product. This is common in protein production where a seemingly innocuous innovation in microbial control for food, beverage, wine or beer can demonstrate effectiveness for pharma applications. Finding that the supply chain is already trying to purchase shows that the cost of market entry will be lower and that vetting proof of concept can be faster than anticipated.

Closing

These are six signs I look for – what else indicates that the effort is worth it for positioning industrial products into a healthcare supply chain?

[FYI – LinkedIn Banners are 1920 x 1080 Pixels – this image was produced using Canva.]

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Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park: Deconstructing the Literary Launch of a Franchise – Chapter 9 “Plans” (Pages 59 – 66)

Posted on December 3, 2023 by flybrand1976

Chapter 9 returns us to Alan Grant’s velociraptor excavation site where he is provided information about Isla Nubar that lacks any context or clarity. He imagines the velociraptor they excavate as a living organism, hunting in packs and deadly to all. Humorously, he explains that they are likely pack animals and wonders if they will be led by an alpha male. Ingen, we learn later, has engineered all of their animals to be female to control the population.

Best Writing, Quotes:

“The cover was marked: ISLA NUBLAR RESORT GUEST FACILITIES (FULL SET: SAFARI, LODGE).”

Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Page 59

This book is full of epistles, and this is a great example – it is referenced, but not part of the text. Also, Grant has no context for the document, it is simply a set of plans. How can Grant be any use auditing a site about which he knows nothing? It is also a lesson in human conceptualization and imagination – this idea is so foreign, how could anyone possibly imagine what InGen is doing, if one of their ‘trusted experts’ is himself totally unfamiliar with their plans?

How could anyone expect such activity to be safe, or to be vetted for ‘safety’ – if nobody outside of the set of people who profit from the idea – are even able to conceptualize what they’re attempting to do?

Page by Page Highlights:

59

“The cover was marked: ISLA NUBLAR RESORT GUEST FACILITIES (FULL SET: SAFARI, LODGE).” The blueprints are given to Grant ahead of his tour in a neatly folded book, serving as an epistle.

60

“I don’t get it,” Grant said. 

How can Grant serve as a safety inspector at a site which he knows nothing about?  The blueprint mean nothing.

61

“Is there an explanation for the codes?” she said.

The codes are abbreviations of dinosaur names.

62

“You know,” Ellie said, “some of these dimensions are enormous….”

She compares it to a zoo with the scale of a military fortification.

63

“Once you begin exposing a fossil you had to continue, or risk losing it.”

64

“But the kids claimed that within a few year it would be possible to generate an image so detailed that excavation would be redundant.”

65

“Pound for pound, a velociraptor was the most rapacious dinosaur that ever lived.”

66

“Perhaps the velociraptor hunting pack was also ruled by a dominant male.”

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Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park: Deconstructing the Literary Launch of a Franchise – Chapter 8 “Cowan, Swain and Ross” (Pages 57 – 59)

Posted on December 2, 2023 by flybrand1976

The book’s Introduction is a pseudo-epistle of a legal memo, Chapter 8 brings us back to the lawyer’s office where we hear counsel discuss their client, Ingen and their plans for Jurassic Park. Counsel will be sending an attendee along with the audit that is bringing Alan Grant and Ian Malcolm to the island.

A common author method is to introduce a major character, or major plot point, in a belittling, condescending way. Nedry brings down the park while attempting to steal dinosaur DNA in camouflaged shaving cream cannisters. His faulty designs are at the heart of the chaos that Ian Malcolm predicts will emerge from this effort. His designs are faulty because he’s the low bidder – because his requests for more funding are denied, Ingen drives him to sell their secrets.

Nedry – an obvious anagram for ‘N E R D Y’ – is obviously not a ‘just’ anything. He’s the lynchpin for Crichton’s warnings about technology and the heart of multiple plot mechanisms that lead to the horrors on Isla Nubar. However, neither Crichton nor the movie directors attempt to make him sympathetic – he’s simply a cog in the wheel of a machine, and the readers can immediately tell that this is the cog that will fail.

Best Writing, Quotes:

“Just a technical person: the computer system analyst [Nedry].  Review the park’s computers and fix some bugs.”

Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Page 58

Page by Page Highlights:

“We can’t trust Hammond any more.” Gennaro says to Ross.

57

“We’ve got to inspect that island right away.”

58

“Just a technical person: the computer system analyst.  Review the park’s computers and fix some bugs.” Here we meet Nedry, whose actions will doom the park and these visitors.

59

“Perhaps I can even get it delivered to the island while you’re all down there,” Gennaro said.  Gennaro wants to get the Compsognathid specimen from the bite attack away from the risk of public exposure. 

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Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park: Deconstructing the Literary Launch of a Franchise – Chapter 7 “Skeleton” (Pages 48 – 56)

Posted on November 18, 2023 by flybrand1976

Chapter 7 is part of ‘Iteration 2’ – the first iteration set the stage, persuading the reader that dinosaurs could really exist. Chapter 6, the first chapter of Iteration 2 introduces us to the team, and now Crichton takes us into the plot. There are dinosaurs because of a shady company, InGen. InGen has a plan to launch a Jurassic Park to show people dinosaurs, and now we’re getting the main characters to the island. While the book is written 22 years before the 2012 release of Marvel’s The Avengers, Crichton is following the trope of, ‘Avengers Assemble’.

Best Writing, Quotes:

“I’ll tell you frankly, Dr. Grant, I’m having a little problem about this island.”

Dr. John Hammond Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Page 55

Two pages earlier, Dr. Hammond is telling Grant, ‘hey, you should come check out the island.’ Two years earlier, Hammond is funding Grant’s research. The year earlier, Hammond’s team asks Grant to write a ‘thought piece’ on how to feed a baby dinosaur. Hammond is a corporate sociopath who is manipulating with a method called ‘Trickle Truth’.

The reader knows that a raptor attacked and killed a worker, and that InGen covered up the death. From the Introduction, we know that a fateful ‘two days in Costa Rica’ is coming up for the protagonists.

Writing Exercise – How would an honest Hammond ask for Grant’s help?

“I’m worried about the safety of what we’ve been doing. You’re the closest we’ve got to an ‘expert’ in a field we’ve invented on our own. Will you help us?” Hammond would then need to follow up with a candid report on the deaths, accidents, and systems he’s using at the park.

Page by Page Highlights:

49

“Studies of predatory/prey populations in the game parks of Africa and India suggested that, roughly speaking, there was one predatory carnivore for every four hundred herbivores.”

50

“No three toed lizard has walked on this planet for two hundred million years.” Grant on identifying the Costa Rica dinosaur.

51

“Like the coelacanth?”

52

“Crocodiles are basically Triassic animals living in the present.”

53

“You know, you ought to see it, Dr. Grant.” John Hammond invites Grant to attend. 

54

“It’s a biological specimen, a partial fragment of an animal collected from Central America. A living animal.” Grant is excited about a single animal, while Hammond now becomes worried. 

55

“I’ll tell you frankly, Dr. Grant, I’m having a little problem about this island.” Hammond has trickle truthed Grant about the EPA.

56

“Pack lightly.  You don’t need passports.” Hammond to Grant – as the park is operating far outside the law.  

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Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park: Deconstructing the Literary Launch of a Franchise – Chapter 6 “Shore of the Inland Sea” (Pages 35 – 48)

Posted on November 17, 2023 by flybrand1976

Chapter 6 begins ‘Iteration 2’ – the second of seven sections that spans from pages 35 – 93. The first iteration was all setting the stage, this is the first chapter where we meet characters that are not just protagonists in the book, they are also iconic movie characters from the film franchise. Paleontologist Alan Grant, his assistant Ellie Satler, and Jeff Goldblum’s iconic character Ian Malcolm all enter the scene. Malcolm is the source for the quotes on all of the ‘Iteration’ cover pages, and in chapter six he is referenced in the story for the first time – although we don’t yet meet him.

Best Writing, Quotes:

“The modern world was changing fast, and urgent questions about the weather, deforestation, global warming, or the ozone layer often seemed unanswerable, at least in part, with information from the past.”

Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Page 35

Crichton’s perspective on the modern world, climate change, and the tension between science, civilization and policy is still developing in Jurassic Park – it comes to the forefront in his later books.

Writing Exercise – Take the quote and make it Active Voice, Present Tense:

“The modern world changes fast; urgent questions about weather, deforestation, global warming, or the ozone layer are unanswerable solely with information from the past.” Is it reasonable to ask how we would have information from the future? I assume Crichton means that civilization needs to see that we can predict what will happen in the future based on the data we have – that the climate models are more predictive than weather models.

Page by Page Highlights:

35

“Alan grant crouched down, his nose barely inches from the ground.”

36

“He stood, a barrel chested, bearded man of forty.”

37

“The modern world was changing fast, and urgent questions about the weather, deforestation, global warming, or the ozone layer often seemed unanswerable, at least in part, with information from the past.”

38

“Grant was amused to see Morris gaping at her.  Ellie was wearing cut-off jeans and a workshirt tied at her midriff.  She was twenty-four and darkly tanned.”

39

“And he took some pains to distance himself in dress and behavior from the Teacup Dinosaur Hunters, even delivering his lectures in jeans and sneakers.”

40

“There’s nothing below the forty-fifth parallel.”  Hammond’s Foundation is focused on finding DNA in frozen remains.

41

“The foundation has spent seventeen million dollars on amber. They now possess the largest privately held stock of this material in the world.”

42

“It was the Xerox of a check issued in March 1984 from InGen Inc., Farallon Road, Palo Alto, California.”

43

“There were paleontologists like me, and a mathematician from Texas named Ian Malcolm, and a couple of ecologists.” – The most iconic character isn’t introduced until Page 43!

44

“They’ve been dead sixty-five million years. You’d think his calls could wait until morning.”

45

“In 1986, Genetic Biosyn Corporation of Cupertino tested bioengineered rabies vaccine on a farm in Chile.” Is this real?

46

“Countries that perceived genetic engineering to be like any other high-tech development, and thus welcomed it to their lands, unaware of the dangers posed.”

47

“Sure. They could feed a baby hadrosaur.” Grant’s answer is preposterous to him, but we’re learning of the existence of Jurassic Park through his eyes.  His sarcasm now balances out his wonder later in the book.

48

“Well, it was something about identifying some remains.” Alice Levin has called about the Costa Rica dinosaur.  The answer is just next to them at all times, raising the stakes and the suspense to the reader.

<Have a near accident about to impact a main character at multiple times.>

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Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park: 1st Section, “First Iteration”

Posted on November 16, 2023 by flybrand1976

Published in 1990, this book launches an entertainment franchise with the 1994 theatrical release of the blockbuster movie. The characters and plot are faithful to the source material. The book is broken down into seven sections, listed as ‘Iterations’. This first iteration, and I include both the introduction and the prologue, consists of 31 of the books 458 pages (~7%).

None of the major characters made famous in the film are introduced. We don’t see the island. Instead we learn that small dinosaurs have escaped the island and attacked a young girl, that other attacks have occurred, that people are trying – and failing – to identify the source of these attacks. Crichton has made a mundane, approachable – because it is small – dinosaur real and made it a threat. He hasn’t hit the reader in the head with a tyrannosaurus in the first scene, nor has he unleashed a pack of velociraptors into a major American city. He’s making the animals real by establishing the wild world of biotechnology and by showing how a company could come to exist that could create such animals. He’s creating realistic dinosaurs with his writing of their smell, their behavior, and referencing animals that the readers know are real.

If the threat is real, then the reader’s tension will be real. If the reader knows that the risk of Jurassic Park is real, and that the characters are walking into a trap, then they will build their own tension as they anticipate the characters learning the truth of the world that they’re already in.

Introduction (link)

The introduction is written almost as an epistle titled, “The InGen Incident” and closes by referencing ‘two days in 1989’. It is a lawyerly short story summary of what the reader is about to experience through the eyes of the participants in those fateful two days on the island that is Jurassic Park. Crichton uses similar methods in other books to pull the reader in and provide context. This method also adds a layer of realism to the encounter – it acts as a primer to introduce the reader to what they’re about to experience. It’s like the set up experienced while walking through a line at a theme park; we are brought into the world, shown artefacts, and may hear or see glimpses of the main characters.

Prologue: The Bite of the Raptor (link)

We’re thrust straight into the world in which Jurassic Park is under construction and a construction worker is attacked by a dinosaur, a raptor. He is flown to a hospital where he dies from his wounds.

Crichton establishes several major rules for the book right away;

  • The dinosaurs are dangerous and not controlled.
  • The island is remote – beyond the oversight of any kind of government, and too far away for anyone to readily get help.
  • The corporate entity overseeing the dinosaurs will behave as any capitalist entity would be expected to behave. Deaths are sad, but don’t merit a full ‘safety stop’, and legal liability is important to minimize even if it requires theft of a camera to remove incriminating evidence.

These are important tenants for the ‘rules’ of the book. Crichton has established that biotech research is unsupervised and similar to the ‘wild west’ in the opening introduction. The dinosaur creators – Hammond and the InGen investors will also exhibit systemic overconfidence in their ability to control nature. Here we see a man die, fearing for his life and calling out monsters. The physicians around him have to go along with the corporate lie of a ‘construction accident’, even as they see that it is false.

Chapter 1: Almost Paradise (Pages 9 – 14)

Jurassic Park wasn’t the success it is because it was the first book to discuss dinosaurs – it was a hit because Crichton made the dinosaurs real and personal. Here we encounter the Bowman’s – a typical couple on vacation with their daughter, complete with travel tension, budget issues, and a hesitancy to ask for directions. And then their daughter is attacked by mysterious ‘lizards’ – which the reader knows are escaped dinosaurs.

The ‘escaped’ nature of the dinosaurs also starts a countdown clock which will be used later in the book as a mechanism to create urgency. The audience knows that somewhat benign dinosaurs escape from Jurassic Park, so this allows real concern that more dangerous and deadly dinosaurs – such as the raptors that killed the park worker in the prologue – must be kept from escaping. Crichton ups the stakes at every point in the book – he injures a child and uses it to show that much worse, much deadlier injuries are also possible should more dinosaurs escape.

Chapter 2: Puntarenas (Pages 16 – 21)

Crichton jams the second chapter with emotion and fear. The Bowmans have rushed their injured daughter to their hospital. They are simultaneously believing her story that she is attacked by lizards, and she is not being believed about the number of toes that the lizards have. If it is three toes – dinosaur, four toes – lizard. The physicians now frame the problem incorrectly – they can’t imagine what could attack her, so they assume that it wasn’t an attack. Rather than wonder what could create such an injury and leave open a sense of wonder, they force uncertainty from their minds.

As they remove a willingness to explore uncertainty their analytical capabilities are decreased. The reader is in suspense because we know the answer is “Dinosaurs!” and yet at every moment where the analytical tool kit imagined by Crichton in 1990 is not allowed to be used in a creative manner which could help them recognize that they’re dealing with biotech built reptilian Frankenstein.

Chapter 3: The Beach (Pages 22 – 24)

Crichton tells the reader that there are many similar bite incidents to the one experienced by the Bowman’s daughter. He describes the behavior of howler monkeys because by looking at the behavior of one unusual animal the reader becomes more open to the behavior of the truly exotic dinosaurs. Just as Crichton uses the TV Trope of ‘Famous, Famous, Fictional’ (TV Tropes Explanation) in the Introduction, he uses the same setup for introducing the dinosaurs; “Lizard/Bird, Exotic Animal, Biotech Dinosaur.”

Chapter 4: New York (Pages 25 – 28)

The chapter ends with Crichton really upping the stakes – we’ve now got a dead baby in a bassinet in Costa Rica from the same bites that sent the young Bowman to the hospital earlier. We’re also watching the tiered escalation of problem solving – the accident report and unknown toxicology arrives at the desk of a researcher in New York. Because he is not confronted with a clear visual of a dinosaur biting a baby, he can’t imagine what the possible source of the problem could be. His diagnostic tools let him get close to the problem, but it isn’t identified with the urgency that the reader knows is needed.

Crichton builds tension in a realistic fashion by showing how real systems would respond to a problem that the reader knows is real. The tension arises between a threat that the reader knows of, that the characters don’t yet recognize.

Chapter 5: The Shape of the Data (Pages 29 – 31)

Each of the seven ‘Iterations’ has a drawing of a fractal and a quote from Ian Malcolm – the iconic character played by Jeff Goldblum in the films – who isn’t even introduced until Chapter 7, and is only first mentioned in Chapter 6. This chapter title refers to the chaotic shape of the emerging data – and it does so by getting even more technical. We read of protein sequencing and witness again another near miss of ‘DINOSAURS!’ when a protein used in synthesis is overlooked as cross contamination. Crichton gives the reader the first satisfaction as one of the experts finally says, “it looks like a dinosaur to me.”

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Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park: Deconstructing the Literary Launch of a Franchise – Chapter 5 “The Shape of the Data” (Pages 29 – 31)

Posted on November 15, 2023 by flybrand1976

The book title shouts, “DINOSAURS!” What made it so compelling was the universe Crichton created around the dinosaurs to make their existence seem not just plausible, but inevitable. In this chapter the author delves into proteins, laboratory analytics, cross contamination of samples, and continues to show the reader that his characters keep missing the fact that there is a monster in the neighboring room. The reader knows there will be dinosaurs, and the tension escalates as the characters keep missing out on realizing that there are dinosaurs nearby.

Best Writing, Quotes:

“Because this enzyme was a marker for genetic engineering, and not found in wild animals, technicians assumed it was a lab contaminant and did not report it when they called Dr. Cruz, the referring physician in Puntarenas.”” – Page 29

Jurassic Park, Page 29

This is a monster sentence that fits with Crichton’s theme of overconfidence leading to disaster. It hints at issues that grow in Crichton’s writing that human mistakes are the most dangerous part of science and scientific discovery.

Writing Exercise – Take the quote and make it Active Voice, Present Tense: Lab contamination is a common risk. The enzyme is a common marker for genetic engineering not found in wild animals, and when detected researchers ignore it, assuming its presence to be a result of cross contamination.

Page by Page Highlights:

29

“But among the salivary proteins was a real monster: molecular mass of 1,980,000, one of the largest proteins known.”

…

“Because this enzyme was a marker for genetic engineering, and not found in wild animals, technicians assumed it was a lab contaminant and did not report it when they called Dr. Cruz, the referring physician in Puntarenas.” 

30

“I don’t know,” she said. “But that looks like a dinosaur to me.”

31

“And whatever it is, it can wait until Dr. Simpson gets back from Borneo to identify it.” – Page 31

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Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park: Deconstructing the Literary Launch of a Franchise – Chapter 4 “New York” (Pages 25 – 28)

Posted on November 14, 2023 by flybrand1976

The reader knows there are dinosaurs on an island, and the island is called Jurassic Park. It’s the title of the book. The characters don’t know. Crichton builds tension by letting the reader in as the characters miss many potential opportunities to learn about the dinosaurs but they constantly just barely miss a clue.

Best Writing, Quotes:

“They had run toxicity profiles as well, and they had found only one positive match: the blood was mildly reactive to the venom of the Indian king cobra.” – Page 27

Jurassic Park, Page 27

Writing Exercise – Take the quote and make it Active Voice, Present Tense: Toxicity profiles show only one positive match; the blood reacts to the venom of the Indian king cobra. Had anyone else introduced the idea of dinosaurs having poison prior to Crichton?

Page by Page Highlights:

25

“Dr. Richard Stone, head of the Tropical Diseases Laboratory of Columbia University Medical Center, often remarked that the name conjured up a grander place than it actually was.” – Page 25

26

“While you’re waiting for it to thaw, do an X ray and take Polaroids for the record.” – Page 26

27

“They had run toxicity profiles as well, and they had found only one positive match: the blood was mildly reactive to the venom of the Indian king cobra.” – Page 27

Guitierrez reads a fax from Jones as epistle. 

“On the contrary, he felt his original views were correct: that a lizard species had been driven from the coast into a new habitat, and was coming into contact with village people.” – Page 28

He’s right to be suspicious of the new contacts – but he can’t imagine what is really driving the rash of attack, because it is unimaginable. 

28

“But long before she reached the bassinet, she could see what had happened to the infant’s face, and she knew the child must be dead.”

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Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park: Deconstructing the Literary Launch of a Franchise – Chapter 3 “The Beach” (Pages 22 – 24)

Posted on November 13, 2023 by flybrand1976

This is a ‘filler’ chapter as Crichton continues to get the reader pulled into the plot by comparing the dinosaurs to modern animals and using all of the senses. He brings in smell and feel often when talking about dinosaurs, and surrounds them with present day animals, or descriptions of them, to make their consideration more real to the reader.

Best Writing, Quotes:

“Such a new and distinctive pattern led Guitierrez to suspect the presence of a previously unknown species of lizard.” – Page 23

Jurassic Park, Page 23

Writing Exercise – Take the quote and make it Active Voice, Present Tense: Guitierrez suspects a previously unknown species of lizard because of the new and distinctive pattern.

Page by Page Highlights:

Page 22

“No, like all the others,” the medical officer replied, adding that he had heard of other biting incidents: A child in Vasquez, the next village up the coast, had been bitten while sleeping.” – Page 22

Page 23

“Such a new and distinctive pattern led Guitierrez to suspect the presence of a previously unknown species of lizard.” – Page 23

Page 24

“If there was one howler, there would probably be others in the trees overhead, and howlers tended to urinate on intruders.” – Page 24

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Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park: Deconstructing the Literary Launch of a Franchise – Chapter 2 “Puntarenas” (Pages 16 – 21)

Posted on November 1, 2023 by flybrand1976

The Bowmans get their daughter to a hospital where her injuries are treated. The readers know it is dinosaurs, but the characters are shown to be rightfully puzzled by events. Over confidence, a common villain in Crichton novels makes an appearance, as Dr. Gutierrez assumes that the girl must have been attacked by a common basilisk, because that is the only potential lizard he knows of that fits her description. Even when Christina Bowman describes that the animal had three toes, not four, he assumes her to be an unreliable narrator.

Calling out the three toes and having the young Bowman compare the tracks in the sand to those of the birds on the beach serves to make the dinosaurs more real. Jurassic Park succeeds as the great novel of dinosaur realism because of these common links that Crichton makes from the extinct dinosaurs to modern living animals.

Best Writing, Quotes:

“Then what could it be?” Dr. Cruz to Dr. Gutierrez.

They’re framing the problem wrong. Because they can’t conceive of something other than a basilisk, they force the answer to be a basilisk. This same issue will come up later in Jurassic Park when the system starts trying to count the number of dinosaurs on the island – a forcing function leads to the wrong answer, because they’ve asked the question the wrong way.

Page by Page:

“Mike would not soon forget the frantic drive back to civilization, the four-wheel drive Land Rover slipping and sliding up the muddy track into the hills, while his daughter screamed in fear and pain, and her arm grew more bloated and red.” Page 16

She’s been attacked by small dinosaurs that are dangerous in a real way that is unexpected to the modern reader. We’re learning that the creatures are real, we’re learning of the dangers the heroes will face when they eventually voyage into Jurassic Park.

“She has drawn it standing on its hind legs…” Page 17 – Dr. Cruz says of the picture drawn by the daughter of her dinosaur assailant. The reader knows its dinosaurs, but the characters do not yet know.

“I am sure this lizard was a Basiliscus amoratus, a striped basilisk lizard found here in Costa Rica and also in Honduras.” says Dr. Gutierrez. Page 18

Over confidence is often the villain in Crichton novels. That is true here and will only grow as the plot thickens.

“And she said there were three toes on the foot.” Ellen tells the ‘expert’ that his hypothesis doesn’t fit. Why wouldn’t her daughter be an accurate narrator? Page 19

“Immediately the analysis of the saliva was halted, even though a preliminary fractionation showed several extremely high molecular weight proteins of unknown biological activity.” Page 20

As in many Crichton novels, an automated process is halted because of human error. This was common in Andromeda Strain and will also cost lives through the rest of this book.

“She held up her hand, middle three fingers spread wide. “And the lizard made those kind of marks in the sand, too.” Christina Bowman to her mother, Page 21.

“Then what could it be?” Dr. Cruz to Dr. Gutierrez.

They’re framing the problem wrong. Because they can’t conceive of something other than a basilisk, they force the answer to be a basilisk. This same issue will come up later in Jurassic Park when the system starts trying to count the number of dinosaurs on the island – a forcing function leads to the wrong answer, because they’ve asked the question the wrong way.

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