The Biotech Century: The Coming Age of Genetic Commerce
By Jeremy Rifkin
Victor Gollancz. 271 pages. £16.99 (hardback)
ISBN 0 575 06658 X
This book is a dark and disturbing wake-up call to the world. The technologies and developments it covers will be the decisive and shaping influences on the structure and nature of humanity as we know it for many decades to come.
Their potential for good, and for harm, is almost unimaginably vast and reaches far deeper into our world, even into our very selves, than anything that has gone before. How extraordinary then, that there is almost no serious debate at all about how we will use this burgeoning power. This book has been written with the express intention of opening that debate by making known to the layman the magnitude of the issues involved, the real prospects for the future of biotechnology, and the possible consequences of its application.
