Word: rifkin
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...self-described economist, philosopher and teacher, Rifkin grew up in Chicago, the son of a plastic-bag manufacturer. It was in the late 1960s that Rifkin -- then a student at the Wharton School of Finance, where he was locally famed as both party animal and class president -- decided to become a professional protester. His conversion to the antiwar movement wasn't triggered by emotionalism or peer pressure. He immersed himself in the history of Viet Nam and emerged convinced that America's leaders were dangerously ignorant about Southeast Asia. Did it strike him as odd that he claimed...
...Rifkin helped organize demonstrations at the U.N. and the Pentagon, and haunted bars near military bases to find soldiers who would testify about U.S. crimes. After the war Rifkin worked in Harlem as a VISTA volunteer and in 1976 organized a so-called People's Bicentennial to celebrate what he considered the real national virtue: not patriotism but civil disobedience...
...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...