Short answers, pulled from the story.
Michael Crichton's books sold over 200 million copies worldwide during his lifetime and after his death. He published 25 novels under his own name and pseudonyms, with more than a dozen adapted into films.
Crichton received an MD from Harvard Medical School in 1969 and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, from 1969 to 1970. He never obtained a license to practice medicine, choosing to focus on his writing career instead.
Crichton wrote under two pseudonyms. He used John Lange for a series of paperback thrillers beginning with Odds On in 1966, a name derived from cultural anthropologist Andrew Lang. He used Jeffery Hudson, based on a 17th-century dwarf in the court of Henrietta Maria, for the 1968 medical thriller A Case of Need, which won the Edgar Award in 1969.
Westworld (1973), written and directed by Michael Crichton, was the first feature film to use 2D computer-generated imagery. The film depicts robots at a theme park that malfunction and begin killing guests.
Crichton created ER based on a 1974 pilot script called 24 Hours, which was itself drawn from his 1970 nonfiction book Five Patients. Networks showed no interest in 1974, but Steven Spielberg helped develop the project into ER, which ran from 1994 to 2009 and won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 1996.
Crichton coined the term in a 2002 speech to describe the experience of reading a newspaper article about a subject you know well, finding it full of errors, then reading the next article on an unfamiliar topic as though the newspaper were suddenly reliable. He named it after physicist Murray Gell-Mann, with whom he said he had discussed the phenomenon.
Crichton argued that human activities are not significantly contributing to global warming and that climate scientists exaggerate the threat. He testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works in September 2005, and his 2004 novel State of Fear centers on the same argument. His views on climate change are widely characterized as pseudoscience.