The Wall Street Journal praises Michael Crichton’s perspective.

Crichton, who died this week of cancer, will not be remembered as a brilliant prose stylist. But he knew how to hold reader attention, and he had an inventive mind that led him to write novels — 26 in all, along with screenplays and works of nonfiction — that concerned the problematic intersection of science, technology, public policy and ordinary life. A medical doctor by training, Crichton knew better than to treat scientists and technologists as a priestly class, immune from temptations of fame, profit or power.