All Things Wise And Wonderful, Next

All Things Wise And Wonderful, James Herriot - A good finale to the series. Overall, I'd have to say this was the least-good of the books, but it was still quite a good book. The only faults were that the individual stories seemed much shorter, and there was some repetitive nature of the types of stories, when compared with the other two books.
In the first two books, while there were lots of 'funny' stories, and plenty of 'touching' stories, the details were always different. In this final book, there was a lot more "injured animal recovers and teaches me a life lesson", and such, where the specific story is almost the same, just the name, specie, and lesson have changed.
All in all though, it was a decent book, and I feel good to have finished the trilogy.

Next, Michael Crichton - Though he takes some steps that I'm pretty sure are beyond our current level, such as successful retroviral gene-slicing in an adult organism (though the rats/people all eventually die), the overall message is really good, and amplified by the Author's Note at the end, where the content of the judge's ruling is recited and expounded upon.
Crichton's basic argument is that genes can't be owned or patented, because they are a fact of nature, and not anybody's invention or idea in any form. It'd be akin to me patenting the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium, and thereby demanding royalties from everyone for using a product derived from my patent (sunlight).
The many narratives are very interesting, and all relate to a different facet of the coming social and legal problems. One short one that stuck with me was a woman who was birthed using donor sperm tracks down her supposedly-anonymous donor father, and accuses him of giving her her heroin addiction, because his genes included ones that promoted that behavior, even though he had donated in the 70s, when such a thing was unknown.
The two aspects of the sciene that I think Crichton glosses over too much are that - first the general problem - genes have been proven to only cause a predisposition, or an increased likelihood of any correlated factors to occure. I can't give the Dalai Lama gene therapy and give him the "murder gene", and have him start running around killing people. Nor can I give someone the (actually discovered) "heart attack" gene, and know that that's how he'll die. You can have all the genetic markers for - and family history of - heart disease, but if you run a mile a day and eat no HDL, especially if you take that to extremes to counteract the predispositions, you might never have a heart problem, and die from a pedestrian-car accident instead.
The other issue specifically relates to one of the storylines, so if you're actually planning on reading this based on what I've actually read, stop here. A company previously won a court ruling saying that Mr. X's cell line belonged to them, not him. The cells that the company possessed ended up getting destroyed. Mr. X has mysteriously left the country. They decide to have a bounty hunter arrest his daughter and/or grandson for "stolen property", since they have the same cells as Mr. X.... only they don't! they share some of the same genes, but as even one of the attorneys pointed out, they don't own the genes, just the cells. Mr. X's daughter has approximately half of his genes, and his grandson has approximately one quarter. As such any cells they developed would be unique from his own. It seemed as though Crichton - or at least all of his geneticist and lawyer characters - had never heard of basic Mendelian genetics.
Is it weird that my two favorite characters were the two non-human ones? Gerard just because he was such an alien intelligence; it took me a while to realize how smart he was supposed to be. Dave was just awesome, doing both the cute, poor-speech little-kid thing, and also the bad-ass defensive monkey-attack.