Five prominent biophysicists give the United States government an urgent warning: sterilisation procedures for returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later Project Scoop sends seventeen satellites into the fringes of space in order to collect organisms & dust for study. Then a probe falls to the earth landing in a desolate area of northeastern Arizona. A little while later in the nearby town of Piedmont bodies are discovered heaped & flung across the ground faces locked in frozen surprise. But the terror has only just begun because when they try to find the cause of death the scientists dont realise just what kind of unearthly danger they are dealing with... Brilliantly filmed by Robert Wise in 1971 The Andromeda Strain was the first book to introduce Michael Crichtons audacious combination of believable plots & white-knuckled excitement to a wide audience.