Though it’s been much in the news in the past few years—with food labeling initiatives being pushed in more than a dozen states—the debate around genetically modified organisms began in the late 1970s. It was largely started by Jeremy Rifkin and his think tank, Foundation on Economic Trends (FET). In fact, Rifkin proudly admitted:

“You know where the opposition to GMOs started? In my office. We started the whole opposition worldwide.”

Rifkin began shaping the narrative around genetic engineering when he published his 1977 book, Who Should Play God?, a warning against the dangers of the new practice.

A year later, Rifkin started his think tank, and a year after that he and his co-author Ted Howard waded into a Supreme Court fight on whether the patenting of GMOs would be permitted. They warned the justices that stimulating commercial genetic engineering though granting of patents would mean more GMOs and that would “irreversibly pollute the planetary gene pool in radically new ways.”

Patentable GMOs meant commercially viable GMOs, and that meant more of them. Rifkin and Howard’s stated goal was precaution, but their apocalyptic pronouncements and attempts to prevent an industry growing around this technology seemed more like an attempt at prohibiting it.