Life Sciences

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A conversation with Juan Enriquez, author of AS THE FUTURE CATCHES YOU: How Genomics and Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth (Crown Business / October 23, 2001)

This book is very hard to categorize - it covers science, technology, economics, politics, health, lifestyles, and more. How would you sum up your main idea?
Technology and the ability to use and transmit data are what drive civilizations. Countries, regions, and individuals that remain illiterate in the world's dominant language fall behind really quickly. That's one reason you see so many great archeological ruins, because inhabitants of the great cities of each period couldn't keep up. Over the millennia, the most important language has gone from Egyptian, to Greek and Latin, to French, to English, to binary. Today the most important language you can teach your kids is genetics. Those who refuse to learn will be functionally illiterate and unable to understand, much less compete in, a rapidly changing economy.

Who do you see as your audience?
This book is for anyone who is curious about the future, and I hope it will spark debates around family dinner tables. No matter what Mom and Dad do for a living, or how much they know about science, they can read the book quickly and have a different take on what's happening around the world. The same for their children, whether they're in college or high school. Topics like genetic engineering and cloning are constantly in the news, and I want to help people understand them and wrestle with them.

Why did you use this unconventional format of bulleted facts mixed with charts and graphs and pictures?
Many people are afraid of science -- they think it's beyond them. Scientists reinforce this by cloaking their work in their own private language. As a result, we rarely understand and debate the greatest single driver of wealth and growth, which is knowledge. But today's discoveries affect us all, so we have to frame the debate in terms everyone can understand and relate to.
Also science is fun and whimsical, and I really wanted the book to reflect this. I hope it can transmit some of the excitement I feel about the marvelous adventures going on in science and technology today.

Your background is mostly in economics and international politics -- how did you get so involved in genomics and other science topics?
I never intended to get involved, but during the course of my research I found that technological discontinuities are the greatest single driver of long-term economic success…or failure. And the ability to understand and apply gene research is probably the greatest single discontinuity we have seen since the industrial revolution.

Bigger than the Internet?
Yes. The digital revolution was just the beginning. The genomics revolution will be far more powerful.

Yet as a news story, the mapping of the human genome this year came and went pretty quickly. Did the media grasp its true significance?

Imagine sipping coffee in a European plaza, discussing the future of the world with your friends. It's October 12, 1492, the day that Columbus landed and changed the course of history forever. But you have no way of knowing what Columbus has accomplished, and even if you heard a news report, you wouldn't understand the implications.
Something similar is happening right now. On February 12, 2001, it became possible for any one of us to access the Internet and browse the entire human genome -- a map of the code that makes us human. But very few people understand what that means. Soon it will fundamentally change the way we look at the world. It will determine which countries and companies end up being dominant in half a century.

Give us an example of that. How differently do you think medicine will be practiced in 20 or 30 years?
Medicine will evolve the way dentistry has evolved -- from brute force intervention to prevention.
Your grandparents went to the dentist to get their teeth pulled. You went to get your teeth filled. Kids today go to get their teeth cleaned. A dentist's office is now mainly a collection of hygienists because our mouths are a lot healthier - we need less intervention.

As we understand disease better, because we can map and attack microbes better, or because we can start to tell what diseases we may be statistically more prone to, we will live a lot longer and remain much healthier. We will carry genetic ID cards. Medicine will be personalized and preventive. We will need fewer and fewer surgeons.

Do you have all your money invested in biotechnology stocks?
No. This is a revolution, which implies there will be a lot of changes and casualties. During the computer revolution you might have bet on the market leaders several times…and lost a lot of money. Bill Gates began his career as a programmer using an Altair computer. Wang, Tandy, and Commodore were dominant brands. None thrives today. You can bet life science will become a massive driver of the global economy and business growth, but it is VERY risky to bet on specific companies.

Buying biotech stocks is a high risk, but biotech will likely become an ever larger portion of any diversified growth portfolio.

A lot of people are afraid of genetically modified foods, cloning, and other aspects of the genomics revolution. What would you say to them?
I am glad there are a lot of folks asking questions -- we all want safe food. But those who fear change also have to realize that we have been engineering food for centuries; "all natural" tomatoes are green, small, and slightly poisonous. We can use these technologies to improve the quality of the food we eat, to produce cheap vaccines and medicines, to create renewable energy sources. As global population increases we can either continue increasing agriculture's footprint in places like the Amazon, or we can use the land we already till more productively.

Do you worry about privacy issues for genetic information? Will employers refuse to hire people who are genetically predisposed to a serious disease? Will insurance companies refuse to cover them?
None of us will be insurable under current regulations in the near future. We all have a few flaws within our genes which could be deemed "pre-existing conditions," and gene chips can tell us ever more about ourselves. This means we have to be much more aggressive in legislating against genetic discrimination and establishing "no fault" health insurance programs.

You say that the gap between rich and poor countries now depends mostly on science and technology. The U.S. has Silicon Valley and most of the big biotech companies -- does that mean we don't have to worry about foreign competition?
Because technology is moving so quickly in so many areas, rich countries that were deemed the "future of Asia" in the 1960s, like Burma and the Philippines, have become basket cases. Meanwhile companies that came out of "poor states," like Japan and Korea, are among the top ten patent producers in the U.S.

The U.S. is still the dominant biotech power, but there is little historical precedent that says it must remain so. Regions that do not nurture emerging technologies and attract ever more smart people soon become history.

If you could change America's education system, would you make it more like Taiwan's and South Korea's, with intense scientific training and brutal competition? Or is there an easier way?
Different countries learn in different ways. A mirror image of Japan might create better math scores, something that would certainly be desirable given that the U.S. is near the bottom among the developed countries. But it might also constrain a lot of the entrepreneurial and creative flair required. The way the U.S. has stayed competitive so far, despite lagging high school science, is to import brains, either into its academic programs or into its high tech companies. This may not be sustainable as other countries realize the single most important source of development is a smart tech entrepreneur.

Tell us about your new job at the Harvard Business School. What are your goals for it?
We have established a new life science project to start to map the ways in which life science technologies (genomics, biotech, nanotech) are changing the global economy. There are some obvious places to start -- pharmaceuticals and biotech are different beasts today than they were a decade ago. But you also see the change in surprising places. Gene research is the single most important driver of new computers and software in places like IBM, Compaq, and Sun Microsystems. Cosmetics companies are hiring molecular biologists. Energy companies are thinking about very different ways to generate renewable fuels. Seed companies have become information-processing companies.

When you think about the future, what excites you the most, and what frightens you the most?
We are acquiring direct and deliberate control over the evolution of most life forms. This is a power that will allow us to feed more people, cure more people, and live far better lives. That's very exciting. But it will also change the nature of things like warfare and terrorism, which of course is very frightening.