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Jeremy Rifkin continues to write some of the most thoughtful, and at the same time intensely engaging, discussion of the emerging trends in the on-going scientific and technological revolution. His book The End of Work (1995) is, in this reviewer's opinion, the most comprehensive and penetrating analysis of the coming interplay between utopian promise and economic displacement. Now, with The Biotech Century, he opens our eyes to a vast new set of issues that will, without exaggeration, make the world stand on its head.
Even though we are just at the beginning of the biotechnological revolution, much has been done already, as each day's newspaper attests. Rifkin tells how much of the cotton grown in Alabama is already genetically engineered to kill insects. In 1996, a type of predator mite was let loose in Florida to devour other mites that destroy strawberry and other crops. Scientists are creating bacteria that can make plastics, and the first plastic-producing plant is expected in 2003. In 1997, the first mammal (Dolly, the sheep) was cloned. Genetically engineered human insulin is being produced. Work is going forward to render mosquitoes incapable of spreading disease. Human skin, ears, noses, heart valves, lungs, livers, pancreases, and bladders are being made in the laboratory; and Rifkin cites the prediction that,by 2020 95% of human body parts "will be replaceable with laboratory-grown organs." An anti-freeze protein gene is taken from flounders and spliced into tomatoes' genetic code so that the tomatoes will be frost-resistant. Likewise, chicken genes are put into potatoes. The first "DNA computer" (using DNA instead of silicon) has been built, and holds out the prospect of computers that will be one million times faster than the best computers today.
Research is rapidly eclipsing even these developments. The Human Genome Project, begun in 1988, is going forward...