Word: rifkin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...Rifkin, who has no real science background, has been deeply distrustful of scientists since he visited Dachau in the late 1960s. "The Nazis could have just slaughtered people, but look at the manner in which they did it," he says. "It was detached, rational. It was scientific. The Holocaust represents the dark side of the modern...
...genetic engineering equivalent to mass 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...
...Rifkin's first assaults on DNA technology was directed at Steven Lindow, a plant pathologist for the University of California, Berkeley. Lindow had discovered a way of snipping a particular gene from bacteria so that the redesigned microbes resisted frost formation down to 24 degrees F. Theoretically, crops sprayed with the microbes could be protected from cold snaps. In 1983 Lindow got permission from the NIH to test his bugs, which he called ice-minus, on a small plot of potatoes in Northern California...
Lindow's bugs were to be the first genetically altered bacteria released into the environment. Although there was strong evidence that the microbes were benign, biologists at Berkeley and the NIH had failed to consider fully the experiment's environmental impact. The oversight allowed Rifkin to sue to block the experiment. The courts agreed, and, thanks to Rifkin, testing was postponed for three years while the NIH, the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency struggled to draw up rules under which genetically engineered products would move from the lab to the field...