TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120489/12048900.022

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 13KB | 236 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 102

The Most Hated Man In Science


To some "the Abominable No Man," gadfly JEREMY RIFKIN warns of
the dangers of uncontrolled experiments with new technologies

By Dick Thompson


    The nation's foremost opponent of environmental neglect and
genetic engineering is waving a $20 bill as he makes a bet. The
scene happens to be a meeting of the Humane Society in Houston,
but the wager, which is part of his script, could just as easily
be offered to a gathering of born-again environmentalists in
Aspen, Colo.; at the Los Angeles home of TV producer Norman
Lear; or on a college campus. Jeremy Rifkin bets that no one can
answer this question: "What value has emerged in the past 100
years as our most dominant value, a value that is the key to our
science?"

    He rarely loses, not because the answer is so obscure but
because it's so obvious. At an easel, he writes his answer,
leaving the word to hang like a biohazard warning sign:
EFFICIENCY. "Everything is efficient," he says. "We're so skewed
toward efficiency that we've lost our sense of humanity. What
we need to do is to bring back a sense of the sacred."

    Rifkin's performance, which he delivers on average 90 times
a year, is a mixture of Jimmy Swaggart, Phil Donahue and Werner
Erhard. Twenty years of teaching, preaching and raising
consciences -- some would call it rabble-rousing -- have refined
this show to the point that it has a slick, thoroughly
professional sheen. Rifkin moves through an audience as if it
were his private party, talking, interviewing, questioning and,
occasionally but ever so kindly, embarrassing. He will perform
for 30 minutes or eight hours, depending on the contract. His
basic sermon is an attack on "the Boys," as he calls Francis
Bacon, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, John Locke and other
architects of efficiency. And the Boys' great sin? To have
created an atmosphere that allows scientists to impose untested
new technologies on society without considering their broader
implications. Says Rifkin: "Faster is not necessarily better."

    It's a 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."

    To 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."

    To be 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 is that Jeremy is a professional
activist, and he says and does whatever he needs to do to draw
attention to his position."

    In the 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 from cows that are being fed
a genetically engineered growth hormone. Indeed, Rifkin's
success at blocking research projects led one biotech newsletter
to label him "the Abominable No Man."

    In 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."

    A 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 to be better
informed than the President? "Yeah," says Rifkin, "I always
thought that was weird." Then as now he rarely doubted that he
was right.

    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.

    By the 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 age."

    Is 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 and is owed reverence and care.
There must be a balance between efficiency and empathy. We see
ourselves as helping to provide that balance."

    One of 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.

    Outside the courtroom, Rifkin warned that the widespread
use of ice-minus would lead to all sorts of natural disasters,
including the disruption of rainfall patterns. (Lindow and his
backers say this is hogwash. They note that the ice-fighting
bacteria, developed into a commercial product called Frostban,
was sprayed on a test field in 1987. As they predicted, it
proved harmless.) Typically, Rifkin would plunge into a
scientific setting, armed with papers from dissident
researchers, and warn about the potentially catastrophic
consequences of inadequately regulated research. Says geneticist
Zinder: "The accusations are made simply, with simple words. But
the proof is very sophisticated and often difficult to grasp."
Rifkin acknowledges that he occasionally uses scare tactics. But
he claims that the scientific establishment is equally guilty,
both of excessive rhetoric and of usurping policy decisions that
need more debate than they are being given.

    "Is there any role for the public in ethical, social or
environmental discussions of the science and technology being
placed into our culture?" Rifkin asks. "Is the proper role of
the public only to applaud the claims of scientists? Is that our
only role? Or is our role to be informed and engaged in the
process? My impression is that the scientific establishment has
had a free ride until recently. Even with the mistakes that we
might make, we're opening up the process of debate around some
of the most important things in our lives. We're opening up
science and technology to scrutiny beyond the scientific
establishment. If I do nothing else, that is a major plus for
everybody."

    Rifkin is surely justified in seeking precise regulations
for genetic research, to protect the health of the individual
and the environment. And his call for closer public scrutiny of
scientific deliberations is laudable, although perhaps
impractical in a society where so few laymen have enough
technical knowledge to comprehend what the experts are really
doing. But there is good reason to question the fairness of
Rifkin's angriest assaults on scientists as mad magicians and
unethical disciples of Dr. Strangelove. When Rifkin is most
successful, he may slow basic research, delay a medical advance,
perhaps even damage the economy. Still, it is a small price to
pay for the prudent utilization of the powers of science. "It's
critical for these things to be done," he says of his work.
"Nothing's going to stop it. They'll have to shoot me. They're
going to have to deal with me for the next 30 years."

    Maybe longer. Rifkin, 44, enjoys most the college lectures
that often have him flying two to four times a week. One recent
swing took the Rifkin show to Alfred University in upstate New
York. As usual, he charmed and joked, provoked and pleased. He
lectured the freshman class about the need for activism at a
time of environmental crisis brought about by misguided values.
Afterward, dozens of students remained in the gymnasium to form
an environmental action group. Leaving the hall, Rifkin looked
back over his shoulder and said to a companion that these were
the children of the antiwar generation. If they do eventually
become Rifkin's political heirs, some would argue, the nation
might benefit if they could deliver their messages with a bit
more intellectual light, and maybe with a touch less partisan
heat.