I should have noted that celebrated author, producer, director and physician died last November.
I was looking back to see when I first started this blog - 25 March 2006 - and I noticed that the 2nd item was a piece I put in how Michael Crichton was criticizing the idiocy of patenting the right to tell a person if they had a disease.
He was only 66 and died of cancer. Apart from being a doctor he was the creator of the TV series ER and most famously as the author of Jurassic Park.