Science & Tech Quote by Jeremy Rifkin

“Bypass classical breeding” lands like a cheat code for biology, and Rifkin knows exactly how charged that sounds. The sentence is built to frame gene editing and modern biotech as a historical break, not an incremental upgrade. “Classical breeding” evokes slow, seasonal, almost pastoral time: selection, crossing, waiting, accepting trade-offs. “Technologies” is the opposite register - sleek, scalable, programmable. The intent is to make the listener feel the pivot from agriculture as craft to life as engineering.

The subtext is doing two jobs at once. First, it sells inevitability. If the defining feature is that we can bypass the old bottleneck, the future isn’t a debate about whether to use these tools but how quickly they’ll reorganize markets and institutions. Second, it smuggles in a moral alibi through tone: “powerful and exciting” functions as an emotional permission slip, inviting wonder before scrutiny. In Rifkin’s hands, enthusiasm is strategic; it nudges risk questions (ecological spillover, corporate ownership of traits, regulatory capture) into the background as management details rather than existential concerns.

Contextually, Rifkin has long positioned technological shifts as civilizational inflection points with outsized social consequences. He’s not merely describing CRISPR-era capability; he’s auditioning a narrative where the economy’s next frontier is the genome itself. The quote works because it compresses a complex political economy - patents, supply chains, food security, inequality - into a single, seductive contrast: nature’s pace versus industry’s pace.