Juan Enriquez will deliver a general-session presentation at PCMA 2012 Convening Leaders in January. For more information, visit www.ConveningLeaders.org. To learn more about Juan Enriquez, visit www.biotechonomy.com/juan.htm.
BIG WAVE COMING: Juan Enriquez, pictured here at PopTech 2008, speaking on the then-current financial crisis, as well as his “ten commandments” to fix the system. Enriquez believes that the ability to “adapt and adopt” will be what separates the winners from the losers—whether nation, industry, or region— in the coming years.
And no matter how you program a computer, you’re not going to get a thousand computers downstairs in the morning. But if I can programaliving structure—then you can repro- duce what you program.Andwhen that starts to apply to worlds
like energy, where you can begin to take sunlight andCO2 and algae and start thinking about making fuel directly, that can begin to change things like energy systems, when you start think- ing about making basic chemicals like the stuff that DuPont is using to make its new clothes, or its rugs, or other materials —that’s a big deal.
When you talk about being able to reproduce algae and maybe use that for fuel, or cells making other cells —are there any negative outputs from that? Yeah. I mean, look—unless life sciences is the first technol- ogy that humans have never made a mistake with, we are going to make mistakes. And what we have to do is we have to meas-
ure the relative risk ofmaking a mistake and the cost ofmaking that mistake versus the consequences of not acting. And dif- ferent societies and different industries and different people will come to different conclusions on that.
Obviously there’s a good portion of people in the United States who feel that we shouldn’t be messing around with things like this. Do moral or religious arguments have any validity with respect to gene science? These are incredibly powerful instruments. And I don’t think the argument is whether you should have moral, ethical, per- haps religious beliefs be a part of the debate. I think the ques- tion ismuchmore fundamental, which is:Dothe current existing structures have a framework that’s flexible and adaptable enough to cope with these kinds of questions?