The Biotech Century

Additional Reviews

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Publisher: Videtur
Hardcover
April 2005

"As usual, Rifkin asks important, provocative questions.... He covers many serious issues that biotech raises and that the industry typically ducks."

— Business Week

"Very readable and thought-provoking... The Biotech Century is an attempt to prod society into formulating an ethical response to biotechnology -- a means of interpreting and controlling the scientific endeavors of the next century."

— The Financial Times

"Rifkin does his best work in drawing attention to the gnawing inventory of real and potential dangers and the ethical conundrums raised by genetic technologies.... At a time when scientific institutions are struggling with the public understanding of science, there is much they can learn from Rifkin's success as a public communicator of scientific and technological trends."

— Nature

"The Biotech Century is Rifkin's latest and most wide-ranging jeremiad against the pace at which genetic engineering and the computer revolution will, in his view, doom humanity unless more public awareness of this ominous trend increases.... He has filled this book with an astonishing range of research published in scientific journals and in the popular media. He is a brilliant thinker and a powerful writer... a shrewd debater in public and in print."

— San Francisco Chronicle

"It is probably best to make clear straight away that this book is not, or not just, an attack on genetic engineering. Jeremy Rifkin is struck by the change that the whole process and its prospects represent in our attitude to nature -- and consequently in the way we conceive of ourselves... this is a shrewd, helpful, and far-sighted book."

New Scientist

"Impassioned, erudite, and well-reasoned."

— Publishers Weekly

"Jeremy Rifkin is a seer, a lucid and well-informed writer devoted to helping us become aware of the titanic impact of technology and the corporate imperative, a cognizance that has never been more urgent."

— Booklist

"In history, revolutions have often turned out to be far from beneficial to those on whose behalf they were claimed to have been initiated. The last thirty years or so have witnessed a biological revolution of incredible dimensions, of which many people have remained unaware. Whereas for many centuries the task of science was seen as helping us understand the ways of nature, in recent years the sciences, particularly the life sciences, have become extremely manipulative: they try to outwit and outrun nature wherever they can.

"Processes that normally might have required hundreds of thousands of years are now performed overnight. The genetic and developmental apparatuses of life are being manipulated, and new living beings with altered properties are being produced.

"Humankind has indeed been give a fateful present. Now, Jeremy Rifkin has written a most remarkable book on the coming Biotech Century, full of information that, as far as I know, has for the first time been collected in such completeness. It deserves to be read by everybody, be he or she optimist or pessimist."

— Erwin Chargaff, Professor Emeritus of biochemistry, Columbia University, and discoverer of "Chargaff's Rules", which laid the scientific foundation for the discovery of the DNA double helix