1970: the movie Andromeda Strain is released based on a book Michael Crichton wrote in 1969 while attending medical school at Harvard.

“Science fiction, which once frightened because it seemed so far-out, now frightens because it seems so near. The Andromeda Strain is as matter-of-fact as the skull-and-crossbones instructions on a bottle of poison—and just as chillingly effective” - Life

http://histscifi.com/essays/radin/technothriller
Michael Crichton, Science Studies, and the Technothriller

Crichton honed his literary voice by blending conventions from his own clinical observations, the dialogue-heavy New Journalism that was taking hold via authors like Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, and the gothic fiction of a century prior. He became celebrated for his ability to combine meticulous attention to authenticating detail about the practices and procedures that characterized professional work as well as the middle-class dreams that made that work seem meaningful, with more sensational speculation about how science could go horribly wrong. His first major science fiction publication was the biomedical thriller, The Andromeda Strain (1969), which he wrote while in medical school. Soon after director Robert Wise made the novel into a movie (1971), a combination that proved to be archetypal of the niche Crichton would occupy and exploit in decades to come.




crighton: Michael Crichton, Science Studies, and the Technothriller
http://histscifi.com/essays/radin/technothriller