"The Andromeda Strain" by Michael Crichton, a science fiction book

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton is a science fiction book about the fictional 'first crisis' in the biological field. The book starts out by pointing out that technology is growing so rapidly, there is bound to be crises, like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and how the biological field of science has never had a major crisis. He also points out that biology is the youngest of all the fields, and a crisis has …

…tranquilizer darts. It would take three well placed shots to bring a man like Dr. Hall down. So he went, and as he was climbing, he got his three, and then some. Enough to where he had to drag himself fifty feet to the nearest station and shut it down. The organism, now inert, drifted west, over Los Angeles. It was going toward more direct energy supplies, away from the carbon dioxide rich lower atmosphere.