There are several curious aspects to Jeremy Rifkin's latest assault on the biotechnology industry Recently, a broad coalition of mainstream religious leaders--led by the United Methodist Church (Washington, DC), in concert with Rifkin's Foundation onEconomic Trends (FET, Washington, D.C)--called a press conference and asked the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO, Arlington, VA) to impose a moratorium on all commercial patents for living organisms, including "human embryos, genes, cells, and animals, including their permanent genetic code," The initiative was couched in the usual high-test, low-performance rhetoric about the "rapacious greed" of the biotechnology industry and the inevitable creation of "parahumans" and "designer human beings."
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