Excerpt from the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

     Malcolm groaned. “Isn’t it time for more morphine yet?”
     “Not yet,” Ellie said.
     Malcolm sighed. “How much water have we got here?”
     “I don’t know. There’s plenty of running water from the tap—”
     “No, I mean, how much stored? Any?”
     Ellie shrugged. “None.”
     “Go into the rooms on this floor,” Malcolm said, “and fill the bathtubs with water.”
     Ellie frowned.
     “Also,” Malcolm said, “have we got any walkie-talkies? Flashlights? Matches? Sterno stoves? Things like that?”
     “I’ll look around. You planning for an earthquake?”
     “Something like that,”Malcolm said. “Malcolm Effect implies catastrophic changes.”
     “But Arnold says all the systems are working perfectly.”
     “That’s when it happens,” Malcolm said.
     “Ellie said, “You don’t think much of Arnold, do you?”
     “He’s all right. He’s an engineer. Wu’s the same. They’re both technicians. They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t see the surround. They don’t see the consequences. That’s how you get an island like this. From thintelligent thinking. Because you cannot make an animal and not expect it to act alive. To be unpredictable. To escape. But they don’t see that.”
     “Don’t you think it’s just human nature?” Ellie said.
     “God, no,” Malcolm said. “That’s like saying scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast is human nature. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s uniquely Western training, and much of the rest of the world is nauseated by the thought of it.” He winced in pain. “The morphine’s making me philosophical.”
     “You want some water?”
     “No. I’ll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists. Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature. Which is true, but that’s not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like ‘seeking truth.’
     “Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether thy can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don’t do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penatrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.
     The scientists want it that way. They have to stick their instruments in. They have to leave their mark. They can’t just watch. They can’t just appreciate. They can’t just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen. That is the scientist’s job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific.” He sighed, and sank back.
     Ellie said, “Don’t you think you’re overstating—”
     “What does one of your excavations look like a year later.”
     “Pretty bad,” she admitted.
     “You don’t replant, you don’t restore the land after you dig?”
     “No.”
     “Why not?”
     She shrugged. “There’s no money, I guess….”
     “There’s only enough money to dig, but not to repair?”
     “Well, we’re just working in the bandlands….”
     “Just the badlands,” Malcolm said, shaking his head. “Just trash. Just byproducts. Just side effects… I’m trying to tell you that scientists want it this way. They want byproducts and trash and scars and side effects. It’s a way of reassuring themselves. It’s built into the fabric of science, and it’s increasingly a disaster.”
     “Then what’s the answer?”
     “Get rid of the thintelligent ones. Take them out of power.”
     “But then we’d lose all the advances—”
     “What advances?” Malcolm said irritably. “The number of hours women devote to housework has not changed since 1930, despite all the advances. All the vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers, trash compactors, garbage disposals, wash-and-wear fabrics… Why does it still take as long to clean the house as it did in 1930?”
     Ellie said nothing.
     “Because there haven’t been any advances,” Malcolm said. “Not really. Thirty thousand years ago, when men were doing cave paintings a Lascaux, they worked twenty hours a week to provide themselves with food and shelter and clothing. The rest of the time, they could play, or sleep, or do whatever they wanted. And they lived in a natural world, with clean air, clean water, beautiful trees and sunsets. Think about it. Twenty hours a week. Thirty thousand years ago.”
     Ellie said, “You want to turn back the clock?”
     “No,” Malcolm said. “I want people to wake up. We’ve had four hundred years of modern science, and we ought to know by now what it’s good for, and what it’s not good for. It’s time for a change.”
     “Before we destroy the planet?” she said.
     He sighed, and closed his eyes. “Oh dear,” he said. “That’s the last thing I would worry about.”