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| Visions & Revisions |
Evolved Thinking
Jan Alexander
10/01/2005
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How are corporations and the investment community adapting to the
changes?
A big part of anyone’s investment portfolio is already invested in the life
sciences. IBM is spending on life sciences as a way of trying to manage the
costs of health care, which is now more expensive than steel and cars. We are
beginning to see a pattern of industrial realignment, and it is not just
pharmaceutical companies acquiring other pharmas. It’s GE acquiring a pharma
company, or chip manufacturing companies focusing on life sciences, because life
sciences will be part of all kinds of manufacturing and information management.
It’s a really exciting time to be alive.
In the beginning there
was what?
Cave drawings. The difference between a tribe and an empire began when the
Egyptians standardized cave wall paintings into hieroglyphs. All of a sudden you
can build an empire because you can give instructions.
| We live in a country that has been around only for five lifetimes, which
is not very long. What makes us think this flag is going to be stable? |
The Europeans
collapsed all notations into 26 letters. Then over the last 30 years we have
moved into an alphabet where all the words we know are collapsed into digital
format. So you don’t need separate alphabets for different languages. You don’t
need a musical notation system, because you can transmit any piece of music
digitally. You can transmit all of the contents of the Library of Congress in
some 1.6 seconds across a single fiber optic cable. Now that changes the rules
of the game fundamentally, because it means that the richest societies on the
planet are those that speak digits. Take a look at the rise of Singapore,
Manhattan, the music industry, aerospace, lawyers, consultants. All of these
entities have risen because they know how to manipulate the digitized
information.
And digital-speak led to mapping the genome?
Yes. Take, oh, a grape. Like all life forms, it is coded in a spiral
staircase that is called DNA, which is like a diskette that holds program
information. If you drop the program for a grape into the ground, it will begin
to execute long strings of AAATCGCGCATA. That’s an instruction. If you tweak the
DNA code for an orange, you will get a tangerine. If you tweak a little more,
you go to a grapefruit. If you tweak a little more, then you can make a vaccine
that immunizes people against cancer.
This operating code is going to become
the world’s dominant language. The life code and the ability to read it will be
the greatest single driver of the global economy. The countries, the people, the
industries that get rich are going to get rich from life sciences and their
application. What I’m interested in is what it will do to countries.
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