Jeremy Rifkin makes an extraordinary observation, and an extraordinary prediction, in The Guardian. This is the age of biology, he says, and it will realign politics around shared goals that could not have been imagined a few years ago. He notes that right-to-life conservatives and left activists are finding common ground in their different, but converging, notions of reverence for life in contrast to a merely utilitarian view driven by the biotech industry and “market libertarians” who make the processes of life “amenable to design, customisation and mass production” and “available to customers as products and services.” He observes- — and I agree — that both groups share an oppositon to the granting of patents on “genes, cells, tissues, organs and organisms”; to GM foods; and to “designer babies”. However, I’m not as confident as he is that progressives are as united, and thus convergent with the right-to-lifers, as he claims they are in opposition to the cloning of embryos for research or even for clinical supply of stem cells, although of course they abhor commercialisation and corporate control of the process. The US does appear to be on the brink of a total ban on human cloning(BBC) for any purpose, as of this writing. But — more fundamentally — will positions with regard to these issues, as he proclaims, totally supplant classical political divisions organized around the industrial-age issues of control of the means of production and distribution of the fruits of labor and profit?