John Michael Crichton was born in Chicago, the oldest of four children, and grew up in Roslyn, on Long Island. His father was the editor of Advertising Age and later president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. At Harvard, after a professor criticised his writing style, Crichton changed his major from English to anthropology and graduated summa cum laude in 1964. He then spent a year teaching anthropology on a fellowship at Cambridge University. In 1966 he entered Harvard Medical School and began writing on the side.

Under the pseudonym John Lange, the German word for tall was a sly reference to his height, 6 feet 7 inches, he wrote eight thrillers. Under the name Jeffery Hudson, he wrote A Case of Need (1968), a medical detective novel. It won an Edgar Award for best novel. In 1969, after earning his medical degree, Crichton moved to the San Diego and spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Already inclining toward a writing career, he tilted decisively with The Andromeda Strain, a medical thriller about a group of scientists racing against time to stop the spread of a lethal organism.With a breakneck speed, suspenseful plot that played out against a carefully researched scientific setting, the novel, he was now writing under his own name, became an enormous best seller and a successful film.He then turned his hand to directing, screenwriting and producing for film and television. “He was extraordinarily knowledgeable about art, science and medicine,” Nesbitt said. “He felt he had a responsibility to educate as well as entertain.”