Word: rifkin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...field of public policy, no one is better than Rifkin in the martial arts of social activism: lawsuits, petitions, debates, lectures and media manipulations. Each year the three attorneys on the staff of his Washington- based Foundation on Economic Trends file about six lawsuits and threaten more. Among other causes, he has battled surrogate motherhood, animal patenting and agricultural experiments involving open-air use of genetically altered bacteria. He tried to delay the launch of the Galileo spacecraft by warning that a shuttle explosion could rain plutonium on Florida. In Wisconsin he has helped start a boycott of dairy products...
...fact, Rifkin probably loses in court more often than he wins. Nonetheless, he has forced the Government to establish regulatory pathways for some genetically engineered products and clarify practices for others. In the world of technological regulation, says NIH researcher Anderson with grudging respect, "it takes some sort of catastrophe or threatened catastrophe to get things to happen, and Jeremy is constantly threatening catastrophe...