Crichton's a piece of work.  Actually he wouldn't be so dangerous if he didn't have the ear of the "decider in chief" who seems to prefer Crichton's Greens-R-Turrists fiction to reality.  As we saw a couple of decades back, Science Fiction Writers Can Be Dangerous when mixed with Presidents of weak intellect:

In 1980, Jerry Pournelle talked me and Marilyn into hosting a gathering of the top minds in the space industry in an attempt to write a space program for the Reagan government, with goals, timetables, and costs. The Citizens Advisory Council for a National Space Policy met four times during the Reagan Administration, and twice since, for harrowing three day weekends. Attendees have included spacecraft designers, businessmen, NASA personnel, astronauts, lawyers. Adding science fiction writers turns out to be stunningly effective. We can translate! We can force these guys to speak English.

We've had some effect on the space program. SDI (Space Defense Initiative, or Star Wars) was drafted at our house in Tarzana. In '93 we watched the DC-X1 fly. It was a toy version of a single-stage ground-to-orbit spacecraft, and the Council generated it. Our design lost out to the current Skunk Works X-33, but the Council caused the revival of the X Program itself.

And how much did that little sci-fi sales pitch cost the taxpayers...?  I remember seeing a video interview with Niven during which he bragged about having "created" SDI, and thinking it was a very strange thing to be bragging about...

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...