Juan Enriquez, 46, is currently part of a crew of sailors and explorers
retracing the voyage of Charles Darwin. Led by Craig Venter, who guided the team
that sequenced the human genome, Enriquez and his colleagues are formulating
ideas about the next stage of human evolution. This fall, Enriquez will publish
a book about a seemingly unrelated problem: the unraveling of the United States.
A truly original thinker, Enriquez might be best described as an old-world
public intellectual who has taken on the future and seen a connection between
the mapping of the human genome, the global economy and the American clash of
red and blue states.
A descendant of the Boston Cabots on his mother’s side,
Enriquez was born in Mexico and served as CEO of Mexico City’s Urban Development
Corporation and as a member of the peace commission that negotiated the
cease-fire in the Zapatista rebellion before returning to his alma mater,
Harvard, to found the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School. He is
now chairman and CEO of Biotechonomy, a life sciences research and investment
firm. In As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing
Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth, he wrote that the mapping of the human
genome, like Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World, is a line
separating history into before and after. His new book, The Untied States of
America: Polarization, Fracturing and Our Future, argues that citizenship is
akin to buying into a national brand that, like any product that does not work
as well as promised, can lose credibility. Enriquez recently spoke with Worth
features editor Jan Alexander about DNA and the wealth of nations.Your area of expertise is difficult to pin down, although I’ll hazard a guess
that no one has ever mistaken you for a creationist.
I keep reinventing myself because I want to learn new stuff. I started out
thinking that the most important things in the world were politics and
economics, so I studied political philosophy and economics. I then did
international finance and business. These are 10-year periods I’m talking about.
I think you should reinvent yourself every 10 years. And then I started asking
myself what makes countries appear and disappear and what makes a country
powerful. It wasn’t inflation or corruption, it was not geography or whether the
leaders went to Harvard or Yale. A lot of countries that had presidents from
Harvard and Yale have failed. I think it’s the ability to understand and apply
new languages and technology that makes a country succeed. When I realized that,
I started studying technology and life sciences.
If your theories are accurate, we will all have to be very efficient learners
to keep up with these advances.
If you think about a newspaper in the Renaissance, the headlines would have
been “At War with Islam Again,” “Crime and Corruption Rampant,” “Kidnappings
Increase,” “Oil Sales Manipulated,” “French Treachery.” Among the stories the
media would have missed would have been that Michelangelo finished his painting
of the right hand of God in the Sistine Chapel. But that is what was lasting.
The news media today are not focused on a change in global language, a change in
the way we see life and energy. We are sitting in the front seat of a
renaissance. We are going to double the amount of data generated by humans
throughout history in the next five years. That presents incredible
opportunities to build a country, an industry, a company.
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