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Richard W. Oliver McGraw-Hill 2000 266 pp. ISBN 0071350209 (hbk) $24.95 In 1999 Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel Corp., stated that "in five years, internet companies will have ceased to exist. By then, every company will have to be an internet company to be able to survive". Richard W. Oliver, the author of the book The Coming Biotech Age, goes a big step further. He claims that "in less than a generation, virtually every company will be a bioterials company" (p. 2) -- Oliver is trying to predict the future (admitting his book to be only one of possible scenarios), building on the assumption that the information age is coming to an end, succeeded by the age of bioterials. Drawing on his readers' emotions, he claims that this new age however would be much more powerful, more global, more persuasive and growing faster than the information age ending in the hypothesis that the technologies of bioterials will challenge our very definition of life. Well, Oliver knows that he is neither the first nor the only one to claim the coming rise of the biotech age. Take, for example, the biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin, who has been discussing the potential impact of biotechnology since the 1970s. In his book The Biotech Century Rifkin (1998) discusses how the impacts of biotechnology will alter not only our definition of life but also our raison d'etre. Rifkin strongly argues for the potential power of the convergence of different technologies, and mainly IT and biotechnology. For him, bioinformatics are the main driver and enabler of biotech's rapid growth.
Oliver clearly builds on Rifkin's influential work; however, he attempts to extend the ongoing discussion of biotechnology around three major issues:
First, Oliver broadens the focus from regarding only biology to including both organic and inorganic matter - the consideration of material science brings him to invent the name bioterials. The second extension of the current discussion can be seen in the attempted focus on the economics of bioterials, rather than on the technical, scientific, or ethical aspects. Thirdly, the author takes an outspokenly positive approach to the contribution of biotechnology -- or bioterials - to our lifes. In this aspect, Oliver clearly takes a different stand from Rifkin who laments...