In little more than a generation, our definition of life and the meaning of existence is likely to be radically altered.

Long-held assumptions about nature, including our own human nature, are likely to be rethought.

Many age-old practices regarding sexuality, reproduction, birth and parenthood could be partially abandoned. Ideas about equality and democracy are also likely to be redefined, as well as our vision of what is meant by terms such as "free will" and "progress."

Our very sense of self and society will likely change during what I call the emerging Biotech Century, as it did when the early Renaissance spirit swept over medieval Europe more than 600 years ago.

Although Dolly the sheep and talk of cloning have gathered sensational headlines and captured the public imagination, many forces are quietly converging to create this powerful new social current.

At the epicenter is a technology revolution unmatched in all of history in its power to remake ourselves, our institutions and our world:

Scientists are beginning to reorganize life at the genetic level. The new biotechnologies are already reshaping a wide range of fields, including forestry, agriculture, animal husbandry, mining, energy, bioremediation, packaging and construction materials, pharmaceuticals, medicine, and food and drink. Before our eyes lies an uncharted new landscape whose contours are being shaped in thousands of biotechnology laboratories around the world.

Global life-science companies, in turn, are quickly maneuvering to exert their influence and control over the new genetic commerce.

The consolidation of the life-science industry by global commercial enterprises rivals the consolidations, mergers and acquisitions going on in the other great technology arenas of the 21st-century - computer telecommunications, entertainment and information services.

Great economic changes in history occur when a number of technological and social forces come together to create a new "operating matrix." I see seven strands composing the operating matrix of the Biotech Century. Together, they create a framework for a new economic era:

First, the ability to isolate, identify and recombine genes is making the gene pool available, for the first time, as the primary raw resource for future economic activity.

Second, the awarding of patents on genes, cell lines, genetically engineered tissue, organs and organisms, as well as the processes used to alter them, is giving the marketplace the commercial incentive to exploit the new resources.

Third, the globalization of commerce and trade make possible the wholesale reseeding of the Earth's biosphere with a laboratory-conceived Second Genesis, an artificially produced bioindustrial nature designed to replace nature's own evolutionary scheme.

m Fourth, the mapping of the approximately 100,000 genes that make up the human genome and new breakthroughs in genetic screening, including DNA chips, somatic gene therapy and the imminent prospect of genetic engineering of human eggs, sperm and embryonic cells, are paving the way for the wholesale alteration of the human species and the birth of a commercially driven eugenics civilization.

Fifth, a spate of new scientific studies on the genetic basis of human behavior and the new sociobiology that favors nature over nurture are providing a cultural context for the widespread acceptance of new biotechnologies.

Sixth, the computer is providing the communications and organizational medium to manage the genetic information that makes up the biotech economy.

Seventh, a new cosmological narrative about evolution is beginning to challenge the neo-Darwinian citadel with a view of nature compatible with the operating assumptions of the new technologies and the new global economy.

The new ideas about nature provide the legitimizing framework for the Biotech Century by suggesting that the way we are reorganizing our economy and society are amplifications of nature's own principles and, therefore, justifiable.

Together, genes, biotechnologies, life patents, the global life-science industry, human gene screening and surgery, the new cultural currents, computers and revised theories of evolution are beginning to remake the world.

Human Life as Intellectual Property

Genes are the "green gold" of the Biotech Century. The economic and political forces that control the genetic resources of the planet will exercise tremendous power over the future world economy, just as the industrial age access to and control over fossil fuels and valuable metals helped determine control over world markets.

Multinational corporations are already scouting the continents, hoping to locate microbes, plants, animals and humans with rare genetic traits that might have future market potential. After locating the desired traits, biotech companies are modifying them and then seeking patent protection for their new "inventions."

Corporate efforts to enclose and commodify the gene pool are meeting with strong resistance from non-governmental organizations and countries in the Southern Hemisphere.

While the technological expertise needed to manipulate the new green gold resides in scientific laboratories and corporate boardrooms in the North, most of the genetic resources that are essential to fuel the new revolution lie in the tropical ecosystems of the South.

Transnational companies argue that patent protection is essential if they are to risk financial resources and years of research and development bringing new and useful products to market.

Southern countries, however, argue that the real research and development effort takes place years before the scientists ever set eyes on the organism and gene, by villagers and peasant farmers who isolate, enhance and preserve valuable herbs and plant crops. That being the case, they claim some form of compensation for their contribution to the biotech revolution.

A growing number of non-governmental organizations, as well as some countries, are beginning to take a third position, arguing that the gene pool ought not to be for sale at any price that it should remain an open commons and continue to be used freely by present and future generations.

The debate over life patents has taken on even greater urgency of late with increasing reports of scientific institutions as well as pharmaceutical and biotech companies bioprospecting the human genome itself in remote regions of the world.

The Human Genome Diversity Project, a scientific effort headed by Dr. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a population geneticist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, has been the subject of increasing controversy since it became public that the group planned to take blood samples from the world's 5,000 linguistically distinct populations in order to assess their genetic makeup and search for any unique genetic traits they may have that might prove important and useful in the future.

Project sponsors hope that by sampling the genomes of the few groups of indigenous peoples that have remained isolated from the rest of the outside world, they will find some "genetic surprises" that could be a boon to humankind in its search for new ways to improve the genetic makeup of the race.

Cavalli-Sforza defends the research, saying it is important to seek out whatever remaining genetic variety exists before it's irretrievably lost, either as a result of the extinction of these populations or through their melding into the general population.

Cavalli-Sforza says that while his personal view is that there should be no patents on DNA, he felt that the commercial value of the genetic information emerging from the Human Genome Diversity Project may make such notions impractical. He suggests, therefore, that "in the unlikely event that there is some gene that becomes commercially valuable, the people who donated it - not the individual, but the group - should somehow share in the advantages."

The extraordinary implications of privatizing the human body -parceling it out in the form of intellectual property to commercial institutions - are illustrated quite poignantly in the case of a patent awarded by the European Patent Office to a U.S. company named Biocyte.

The patent gives the firm ownership of all human blood cells that have come from the umbilical cord of a newborn child and are being used for any therapeutic purposes.

The patent is so broad that it allows this one company to refuse the use of any blood cells from the umbilical cord to any individual or institution unwilling to pay the patent fee.

Blood cells from the umbilical cord are particularly important for marrow transplants, making it a very valuable commercial asset. It should be emphasized that this patent was awarded simply because Biocyte was able to isolate the blood cells and deep-freeze them.

The company made no change in the blood itself. Still, the company now possesses commercial control over this part of the human body.

The entrepreneurial scramble to patent the genome of the human family has picked up substantial momentum over the past several years, in large part because of the quickened pace of mapping and sequencing the approximately 100,000 genes that make up the human genome.

As soon as a gene is tagged, its "discoverer" is likely to apply for a patent, often before even knowing the function or role of the gene.

The increasing consolidation of corporate control over the genetic blueprints of life as well as the technologies to exploit them is alarming, especially when we stop to consider that the biotech revolution will affect every aspect of our lives.

The way we eat; the way we date and marry; the way we have our babies; the way our children are raised and educated; the way we work; the way we engage in politics; the way we express our faith; the way we perceive the world around us and our place in it--all our individual and shared realities will be deeply touched by the new technologies of the Biotech Century.

The backlash

The debate over life patents is one of the most important issues ever to face the human family. Life patents strike at the core of our beliefs about the very nature of life and whether it is to be conceived of as having intrinsic, or mere utility, value.

The last great debate of this kind occurred in the 19th century, over the issue of human slavery, with abolitionists arguing that every human being has intrinsic value and "God-given rights" and cannot be made the personal commercial property of another human being.

Like the anti-slavery abolitionists of the nineteenth century, a new generation of genetic activists is beginning to challenge the very concept of patenting life, arguing that life is imbued with intrinsic value and therefore can never be legitimately reduced to commercial intellectual property.

Feminists, farmers, animal rights groups, consumer organizations, health advocates and social justice organizations around the world are coalescing into a new and powerful countervailing force to the growing genetic commerce that trades in the blueprints of life.

In May 1995 a coalition of more than 200 religious leaders, including the titular heads of virtually every major Protestant denomination, more than a hundred Catholic bishops and Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu leaders, announced their opposition to the granting of patents on animal and human genes, organs, tissues and organisms. The effort was organized by the Foundation on Economic Trends, which I head.

Speaking for the coalition, Jaydee Hanson, an executive with the United Methodist Church, said, "We believe that humans and animals are creations of God, not humans, and as such should not be patented as inventions."

The battle to keep the earth's gene pool an open commons, free of commercial exploitation, is going to become one of the critical struggles of the Biotech Age. "Genetic rights," in turn, is likely to emerge as the seminal issue of the coming era, defining much of the political agenda of the Biotech Century.

This article is adapted from Jeremy Rifkin's new book, The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World (Tarcher/Putnam). Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, D.C.

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