Word: rifkin
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...regulatory agencies works out of a cluttered three-room office in downtown Washington. His pretentiously named Foundation on Economic Trends--cited without further explanation in nearly every story about the biotechnology industry--consists solely of him, an assistant and a part-time secretary. "We have one lawyer," boasts Jeremy Rifkin, "but he does his own typing." Yet Rifkin, 41, has more than compensated for his lack of manpower by using his fertile imagination, boundless energy and shrewd tactics to tie the biotechnology industry in knots. Even the General Accounting Office is impressed; it concluded in a report last month that...
...common threads run through Rifkin's peripatetic career, they are energy and anti-Establishment fervor. As an economics major at the University of Pennsylvania, he was an outspoken critic of the Viet Nam War. In the 1970s he founded and led the Peoples Bicentennial Commission in efforts to finance "revolutionary alternatives" to the 1976 Bicentennial celebration, which he considered to be too commercialized. By 1977 Rifkin had become embroiled in the growing controversy over the new recombinant-DNA technology and was ready to hit full stride. In his book Who Should Play God, published that year, he naively expressed concern...
Perhaps the best insight into Rifkin's complex mind and motivations appears in his 1983 work Algeny, a book that presents a creationist-like view of Darwin and makes it clear that Rifkin disapproves of tampering with the genes of any of God's creatures--from viruses to man. In Algeny, Biologist Stephen Jay Gould charged in a 1985 review, Rifkin "uses every debater's trick in the book to mischaracterize and trivialize his opposition, and to place his own dubious claims in a rosy light." The book, Gould concludes, is "a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading...
...Rifkin remains unfazed by unrelenting criticism from the scientific community. In fact, he has used his considerable powers of persuasion to enlist a few prominent researchers in his crusade. In 1983, for example, he talked two Nobel laureates and other scientists into signing a declaration urging Congress to ban any genetic engineering of human sperm and egg cells, despite the fact that such a ban would halt research aimed at eliminating genetic diseases like sickle- cell anemia and Down's syndrome...
...even Rifkin's critics concede that some good can come from his tactics. Says Biologics Executive Mike Bartkoski, still smarting over the ban on his company's vaccine: "We've been trying to get name recognition. Now, suddenly, because of Jeremy Rifkin, everyone knows of Biologics...