Title: The Biotech Century: Harnessing the gene and remaking the world
Author: Jeremy Rifkin
Reviewer: Billy Hall
A REVOLUTION in biotechnology is upon us and this book presents the evidence clearly. What is said is shocking and what seems likely is frightening. Indeed, the possibilities threaten the frontiers of what we simply call 'nature' - material and non-material.
In approximately 250 pages Jeremy Rifkin, a writer with a penchant for painstaking research, describes a future that boggles even minds already bent toward radicalism. He highlights developments in biotech knowledge, and in the process points to the rapid growth of knowledge in that field. Rifkin says:
"It is estimated that biological knowledge is currently doubling every five years, and in the field of genetics, the quantity of information is doubling every twenty-four months. The commercial possibilities, say the scientists, are limited only by the span of the human imagination and the whims and caprices of the marketplace." (p. 12)
COMMERCIAL EXPLOITATION
As he develops his thesis, he makes the interesting point that commercial interest is driving the revolution. Rifkin points out, for example, that a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court on October 14, 1980 "cleared the way for the commercial exploitation of life" and so, shortly after, a US company, Genetech, successfully offered over one million shares of stock at US$35 per share. Indeed, the response was phenomenal:
"In the first twenty minutes of trading, the stock climbed to US$89 a share. By the time the trading bell had rung in the later afternoon, the fledgling biotechnology firm had raised US$36 million and was valued at US$532 million. The astounding thing was that Genetech had yet to introduce a single product into the marketplace" (p.43).
As he makes out, commercial exploitation has little respect for morality, and so, for example, there is the case of the periwinkle plant 'discovered' in the tropical rain forest of Madagascar, and found to contain a unique genetic trait effective in the treatment of certain kinds of cancer, while successfully commercialised, has left the rain forest people starved of benefit.
Eli Lilly, the multi-national pharmaceutical corporation that developed the drug, is making mammoth profits but not sharing anything with Madagascar. For example, says Rifkin, a decade ago Eli Lily totalled a US$160 million in sales off the
periwinkle product alone, and "Madagascar has not received so much as a penny of compensation for the expropriation of one of its natural resources" (p.38)
MORAL AND ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS
Rifkin, we learn from the publisher, is the author of 14 books having to do with the "impact of scientific and technological change on the economy, workforce, society, and the environment" but seems unlikely to ever touch on a subject so profoundly challenging for change as the biotech revolution. The challenge is particularly ominous for morality and ethics.
The moral and ethical implications of the biotech revolution boggle the mind. Suddenly, the visions of the classical philosophers of Greece come alive regarding the creation of a eugenic civilisation, as human beings are intrinsically re-tooled and their environment socially re-engineered. For the first time, criminals could be sterilised, the feeble minded eliminated and the gifted and intellectually brilliant replicated.
Rifkin reminds that Hitler had argued in Mein Kamph that the "mixing of the higher and lower races is clearly against the intent of nature and involves the extinction of the high Aryan race". Millions were propagandised into believing that false notion, with catastrophic results. Certainly, this book raises disturbing possibilities.
However, the author identifies a good side to the possibilities of perceived revolutionary change. He anticipates engineering of new plants and animals to feed a hungry world; new forms of biological energy to replace a dwindling reserve of fossil fuels; new microbes to eat up toxic waste; and advances in surgery to heal the human body.
Of course, in the final analysis, human beings are creatures of creative choice, and so can turn such positives into negatives and thereby self-destruct. Indeed, a book of scientific grounding and moral challenge as to fantastic as well as fearful possibilities.
Publisher: Tarcher/Putnam Books, 1999.
