Word: newes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wonderful performance, but in the sour view of many scientists, it is largely flimflam. To them, Rifkin is a Luddite, whose opposition to DNA research is based on skewed science and misplaced mystical zeal. Geneticist Norton Zinder of New York City's Rockefeller University calls him a "fool" and a "demagogue." In a scathing 1984 review of Algeny, one of Rifkin's nine books, Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould wrote that it was "a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship . . . I don't think I have ever read a shoddier work...
...Rifkin, such criticism is merely evidence that he is on the right track. "My job," he says, "is to point out some of the problems that might arise with new technologies. Scientists should show us how these new technologies work. Then society, not scientists, should decide if it wants to use them. Scientists are not gods; they're just technicians. They're just human beings, with all the good and bad intentions of everyone else. If you criticize them at all, you're stopping the drive toward utopia. But there has to be both sides...
...sure, some scientists reluctantly allow that Rifkin does ask important questions about the ethical, economic and social implications of the new technologies, as indeed he does. The problem is that Rifkin frequently presents his case in such a shrill and occasionally unscrupulous manner that in the debates he hopes to encourage, fear and anger frequently replace information and reasoned judgment. As a result, the message is too easily discarded with the messenger. Says W. French Anderson, a gene-therapy researcher at the National Institutes of Health (and a Rifkin target): "In private, he and I agree almost exactly. The difference...
...early 1980s, a new Rifkin cause was aborning. The Reagan Administration had begun to unshackle American industry by dismantling regulatory standards and environmental protections. At the same time, researchers were refining the new tools of molecular biology, which enabled them to redraw the blueprints of life. Genetic-engineering companies were launched in this era of deregulation with glowing prospectuses that promised both medical elixirs and vast profits from applications of the new technology...
...murder? Not even Rifkin goes that far, but he does argue that the technology represents a grave danger, both environmentally and philosophically. He fears that society, inspired by science, will take a diminished view of human life as no more than a few strands of DNA. "This is a new technology that goes to the heart of our values," he says. "The end result could very well be a brave new world, very damaging to our human spirit." Says Andrew Kimbrell, an attorney for Rifkin's foundation: "Everything that's living has a meaning and is owed reverence and care...