The Peripatetic Crusader

The scourge of the gene splicers and Government 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 the Agriculture Department has been slow to act on biotechnology because of "anxiety" over Rifkin's legal blitzkrieg. Says Jon Lash, a Vermont environmental official: "I've always been amazed at how he's been able to do it."

If any 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 that in a "handful of years" scientists would be able to create "new plants, new animals, and new forms of human and post- human beings." The same year, he led a group of protesters who disrupted a National Academy of Sciences forum on the risks and benefits of DNA research by chanting, "We will not be cloned!" and waving a banner reading NO PATENTS ON LIFE.

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 as scholarship."

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.

Yet 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."