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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.