—biosciences visionary,venture capitalist,TED regular,andPCMA2012 Convening Lead- ers keynote speaker—isfond of branding things “a big deal.” In hisopinion, the biggest deals over the next several decadeswill be innovations such as using chemicals, sunlight, and algae to produce fuel,and reprogramming living cells to do or make thingsother than what they originally did or made—in short, learning how not only to read, but also to write, “life code.”
But the human race in general, and the United States in partic- ular, isn’t guaranteed to succeed at this historic endeavor.Those industries and nations that do come out on top will be those that are best able, in another of Enriquez’s pet phrases, quoting none other than Charles Darwin, “to adapt and adopt.” Convene spoke to the gene-science evangelist—whois chair-
man andCEOof the life-sciences research and investment firm Biotechonomy—on a day this past August when, in response to America’s then-recent credit-rating downgrade, as well as gen- eralized global economic anxiety, the U.S. stock market was dropping precipitously. This provided a good, if sobering, start- ing point for our discussion.
Do you think any of what’s going on today in the stock market plays into some of what you talk about—whether or not the United States is going to be able to pay sufficient attention to bioscience in the years going forward? Well, there’s a whole series of ways of answering that. The first way of thinking about it is [that] biosciences changes absolutely everything. One question is, what happens if we all live 10 or 20 years longer than the actuarial table or Social Security tables tell we’re actually going to live today? And that’s not incon- ceivable—in fact, it’s probable.
Whatis your background? You were born in Mexico City, is that correct? Yep. So I’ve been very interested in what makes countries and regions and industries successful and competitive. I’ve thought about that for a while. And I studied politics, I studied govern- ment, I studied economics, and I studied business and a whole bunch of stuff. Then about 20 years ago, I suddenly started to realize that it was, to quote Darwin, “the ability to adapt and adopt” thatmade the difference inwhether a country, an indus- try, a region was successful or not. When you overlay technology on that, what’s happening is
you’re being forced to adapt and adopt at a rate that is accel- erating and accelerating and accelerating. And all these indus- tries are just completely upended by changes in how you make things, where you make things, the ease with which you make things. And once I understood that, then I started getting much more interested in science and specifically life science, because I think that’s the single biggest driver of change over the next 20 to 30 years.
What do you believe are some of the things that bioscience will be able to achieve in that near term? What we’re beginning to do is not just understand how life code is written in DNA, and how different things are programmed— but we’re able to photocopythemthroughcloning.Andnowwe’re beginning to be able to read and write life code directly to suit our purposes.Thatmeans that, inthesamewaywe canprogramacom- puter,wecanbeginto program cells or other life forms.And that’s a big deal, because this is a software that makes its ownhardware.