At lunch the other day with my Romanian friend Crinu (how cool is that, having a Romanian friend named Crinu?), the conversation suddenly turned south when he recommended that I read this "great book" about global warming, namely, State of Fear by Michael Crichton.

I told him, as long-time readers of this blog know, that I have read the book and that I have some real issues with Mr. Crichton. But he apparently thought that I just didn't get it, and went on about how the whole Kyoto Treaty is just a plot "by France" and possibly a few other countries to hinder America's industrial strength and prevent us from remaining the lone world superpower.

It got worse. I was informed that the Iraqi war, as it turns out, is a brilliant strategy in that we've taken the battle over to their side of the globe, and created an issue for them to fight about on their soil instead of having the terrorists come here and take innocent American lives. I asked him if it were then moral to overthrow a sovereign nation and sacrifice over 3,000 (and counting) American troops just in order to create a diversion away from a potential attack on U.S. soil, but he had already moved on to his interpretation of Cheney's "1% policy" ("if even 1% of the population of a country is opposed to us, we are justified in invading them").

My Romanian friend's political views actually had me re-thinking my position on immigration.

The next day, he left a copy of Crichton's latest book, "Next," on my desk, and came to my office later that day encouraging me to read it.

"You don't own the organs in your own body anymore," he warned, "because scientists own the patents on your own DNA, and they are allowed by law to come take any organ of yours that they want anytime because they own the rights." He then told me not to raise my eyebrow skeptically, but to read the book and understand.

Oh boy. First Crichton misrepresents meditation as a metaphysical exercise for seeing auras, channelling the dead and divining the future ("Travels"); then he incorrectly predicts that Japan will be taking over the world ("Rising Sun"), when actually it's China; and then he denies the reality of global warming ("State of Fear"). Now he wants me to worry about doctors showing up to claim by kidneys, like the surgeons in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life?"

Well, say this about Crichton, there's no avoiding the boy. In today's Times, he's got an op-ed piece on bioethics titled, "Patenting Life." According to Crichton, the U.S. Patent Office began to issue patents some years ago on genes. By now, he claims, one-fifth of the genes in your body are privately owned.

Although most patents are granted for human inventions, genes are obviously features of the natural world. "Humans share mostly the same genes," he writes. "The same genes are found in other animals as well. Our genetic makeup represents the common heritage of all life on earth. You can’t patent snow, eagles or gravity, and you shouldn’t be able to patent genes, either."

The results, Crichton states, have been disastrous, as the patent holder can demand extravagant royalties from anyone else using that gene in research. A gene’s owner can in some instances also own the mutations of that gene. And the company that owns the patent on a gene he developed from samples he took from you can keep your tissue and do further research on it without asking your permission.

Yikes! Scary stuff. Almost enough, one wonders, to create a State of Fear?

In his piece, Crichton fails to address the argument that without patent protection, scientists won't have any way to protect the results of their genetic research, thus taking the profit out of beneficial studies on new therapeutic drugs and vaccines (and thus discouraging research on new drugs and vaccines, especially in light of this administration's abysmal non-defense R&D spending). But as we've learned from old Mikey in the past, he never was much good at recognizing two sides of an argument.

Damn, I'm starting to sound like Frank Rich! But worse, it appears that now I'm going to have to make myself read another Michael Crichton novel.