The Andromeda Strain

The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the outer fringes of space to collect organisms and dust for study. One of them falls to earth, landing in a desolate area of Arizona. Twelve miles from the landing site, in the town of Piedmont, a shocking discovery is made: the streets are littered with the dead bodies of the town's inhabitants, as if they dropped dead in their tracks. The terror has begun . . . The Andromeda Strain is a 1969 techno-thriller novel by Michael Crichton, his first novel under his own name and his sixth novel overall. It is written as a report documenting the efforts of a team of scientists investigating the outbreak of a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism in New Mexico. The Andromeda Strain appeared in the New York Times Best Seller list, establishing Michael Crichton as a genre writer. ---------- This work also contained in: - [The Andromeda Strain / Terminal Man](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL46874W) - [The Great Train Robbery / The Andromeda Strain](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL24159635W) - [Rising Sun / The Andromeda Strain / Binary](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL23658811W) "The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the outer fringes of space to "collect organisms and dust for study." One of them falls to earth, landing in a desolate area of Arizona. Twelve miles from the landing site, in the town of Piedmont, a shocking discovery is made: the streets are littered with the dead bodies of the town's inhabitants, as if they dropped dead in their tracks."--Cover A military satellite launched to collect organisms in the upper atmosphere comes down in Arizona. Within a few hours, almost everyone in a nearby town is dead. A team of scientists is assembled to investigate