The Great Beyond, Nature's News blog, provides its own perspective on the sad news of Michael Crichton's death on 4 November (http://tinyurl.com/5ton5t). Crichton was not universally popular among scientists, possibly because his favourite theme was 'science gone horribly wrong' — in genetics, nanotechnology, medicine and climate.

In 1993, the year the film came out, a reviewer of Jurassic Park in Nature Biotechnology bemoaned the lack of scientific accuracy. Crichton responded in a letter to the journal: “As Alfred Hitchcock used to say, 'It's just a movie.'”

Yet in his 2004 novel, State of Fear, Crichton presented climate change as a fraud perpetuated by activists and scientists. In support of this view, the author cited the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, asserting that his training in medicine qualified him to evaluate it. As blogger Heidi Ledford puts it: “When President George Bush invited Crichton to swing by the White House for a chat about climate change, I don't recall hearing the author protest, 'Hey, but it was just a novel'.”