When the announcement came in February of the cloning of a sheep named Dolly, Jeremy Rifkin remembered an earlier milestone. It was 20 years earlier, almost to the month, that Rifkin and a group of protesters invaded a meeting on genetic engineering at the National Academy of Sciences and chanted, "We Will Not Be Cloned!" That event marked Rifkin's entry into the public arena as one of the nation's most hectoring critics of biotechnology.

During the ensuing years, Rifkin has been a strident voice on issues ranging from genetically engineered crops to the patenting of genes to biological weapons--and has also served as a social critic on various economic questions, including the effect of information technologies on the workplace. His 1960s-activist style of pressing his views on the world has been executed with every tool at hand: lawsuits, boycotts, guerrilla-theater-like demonstrations, 13 books, and quote after quote purveyed to the media.

One day in late May I visited him at the Foundation on Economic Trends, his small nonprofit group in downtown Washington, D.C. Rifkin is intrigued by the prospect of training his oratory on SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, an institution that is by and large viewed as a representative of the scientific establishment. It has been only a month or so since his organization and others put together a global protest to oppose genetically engineered foods, cloning and patenting.

Cloning, he informs me, represents a lot more than just improved animal breeding. Coupled with the prospect of "genetic customization"--the manipulation of germ-line, or sex, cells to produce desired traits--cloning portends the dawn of an era of eugenics and "bioindustrial design," Rifkin declares.

A few days after our meeting, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, established in 1995 by President Bill Clinton, recommended that legislation be enacted to ban human cloning. But Rifkin, in a subsequent conversation, thinks the proposal does not go far enough and that the temptation to design human beings and make copies of these engineered works will persist. The ability of genetics to reengineer each generation, he argues, could undermine the sense of self, the notion that one's identity is, in part, an endowment of the natural world. "We're creating multiple personas. We're creating a thespian sense of personality where we see ourselves as a work of art, and we see everything in our environment as a prop, as a set, as a stage, as a backdrop for filling ourselves in. We don't see ourselves as ever completed. We are IN-formation."

Such posturing, not to mention the lawsuits, have made the mere mention of the name "Rifkin" enough to agitate government regulators, microbiologists and industry executives. The loathing runs deep. The head of the National Milk Producers Federation called Rifkin a "food terrorist" for his work against recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbgh), which induces cows to produce more milk. Microbiologist and Nobel laureate David Baltimore once referred to Rifkin as a "biological fundamentalist." And a Time magazine headline dubbed him "The Most Hated Man in Science." "One can't say enough negative things about a guy like this," rails Henry I. Miller, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Biotechnology, now a senior research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a prominent Rifkin basher.

Of course, Rifkin believes that society needs its Rifkins, voices that can add critical perspective to the headlong rush to commercialize knowledge about the workings of DNA--what he calls the "genetic commons." Rifkin reiterates his long-standing argument that public debate was missing for previous technology revolutions until the worst happened, pointing to catastrophes at Three Mile Island and Bhopal.

An upbringing on the South Side of Chicago did not necessarily prepare him for the life of an activist. His father was a manufacturer of plastic bags. His mother set up a charity to tape books for the blind after first doing so to help his sister, who is legally blind, through school. He became involved in the antiwar and civil-rights movements while studying at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance. Becoming a professional activist, he acknowledges, owes a certain amount to time and place. "I often wonder if I had been eight years older whether I would be in the family business," he says.

Over the years, he has not succeeded in the U.S. in his quest to stop genetic patenting or to halt the release of genetically engineered organisms into the environment--nor have postulated worst-case scenarios come to pass. But the war, he says, is by no means over.

Within five to 10 years, bioengineered plants will inadvertently lead to weeds that resist herbicides or to insects that can withstand a natural insecticide used by organic farmers, he maintains. "That will create tremendous liability problems, and it will raise the specter of genetic pollution to front and center." (Rifkin and other environmentalists have had more success in pressing their causes in Europe.)

During his tenure as a gadfly, Rifkin and his Foundation on Economic Trends have, in fact, won a few battles. A 1984 suit against the Department of Defense helped to stop construction of a facility in Dugway, Utah, that could have been used for testing the most dangerous of airborne biological toxins. Numerous legal actions by the foundation during the 1980s did not permanently halt any releases, but they did prompt the federal government to increase scrutiny of environmental risks. "He caused people to think more about what they were doing and why they were doing it," says Elizabeth Milewski, special assistant for biotechnology at the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances.

That assessment is not universally shared. Some of Rifkin's opponents charge that he polarized or misled the debate. Dale E. Bauman, a professor of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University and a leading researcher on rbgh, characterized as "nonsensical" Rifkin's claim that the hormone poses a threat to the food supply. "The problem with Rifkin personally and his organization specifically is that a very large portion of the material that they put out represents misinformation," Bauman charges. "It usually contains some pieces of accurate scientific information, which are then put in a context that misrepresents it."

Among Rifkin's greatest successes has been drawing attention to his concerns by bringing together nonscientists into grassroots coalitions to oppose biotechnology-related issues. One of Rifkin's most noteworthy organizing efforts came in 1995, when he helped to persuade 180 leaders, from more than 80 different religious groups, to sign a statement calling for a ban on the patenting of genetically engineered animals and human organs, cells and genes. The announcement became the lead story in the New York Times, and it struck fear into biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry executives, who defend the need for patents to commercialize new products.

Predictably, in the aftermath, controversy erupted. Ted Peters, a professor of theology at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, wrote in his recent book, Playing God: Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom: "How did it happen that so many otherwise thoughtful theologians and leaders of different religious traditions [got] hoodwinked?"

The invitation letter from Rifkin's collaborator, the United Methodist Church, obscured many of the subtleties surrounding the patenting debate, Peters says. It mentioned a 1991 patent granted to a California company, SyStemix, for human bone marrow stem cells (progenitors of blood cells). The letter stated that many in the science community were outraged that a patent had been granted for "an unaltered part of the human body." But the company, Peters writes, had not patented stem cells in their natural state, as the letter implied, but only modified versions of the cells and a process for harvesting them, thereby qualifying the cells as a novel invention. The cells may eventually help cancer and AIDS patients.

In an interview, Peters goes on to conclude that Rifkin's ideas display a tacitly naturalistic or vitalistic bent. They imply that nature is sacred and should be left alone, uncontaminated by technology, a position not accepted by Judaism or Christianity. Rifkin expressed reverence for nature and the need for society to consider forgoing bioengineering in Algeny. That 1983 book outraged some by questioning the objective validity of Darwinian evolution, even citing a prominent creationist to back its arguments.

Concern over Rifkin's involvement, Peters acknowledges, had the positive effect of drawing scientists and industry officials into dialogues with the religious community (sans Rifkin) to better explain their respective positions. C. Ben Mitchell of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission, which signed the statement, notes, "I'm not sure that the discussions would have occurred without Rifkin's first having pushed the issue."

For his part, Rifkin denies that he manipulated anyone. He points out that none of the religious leaders who signed the document have since changed their position. He balks at vitalist or Luddite labels, emphasizing that he has never opposed biotechnology for making pharmaceuticals, for genetic screening or for applying genetic knowledge to areas such as preventive medicine. Over the years, his litany of ideas--he also devotes much time to heralding the perils and promise of the information age--continues to win support from a few philanthropies. According to Rifkin, the Foundation on Economic Trends, with a staff of seven, brings in between $250,000 to $800,000 annually, averaging $450,000 a year.

As time passes, Rifkin's pace may be slowing. When news of Dolly arrived, he decided not to go into the office to take calls from the media, something he would have done a decade earlier. Still, the 52-year-old Rifkin, if he so chooses, may continue his militant ways for another 20 years. That means that what has been called the "biological century" may begin with a shrill oracle prophesying its perils.

--Gary Stix