Juan Enriquez Quotations

One of the good things about the public Human Genome Project is that the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health spent a part of their budget on the ethical, legal, and social implications of their research.

I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis:... a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species.

We have to make sure that when we make choices as a society, people understand the choices, agree with them, and are behind them. Otherwise, the system is going to fall apart.

If you want to compete in bioinformatics, first you need to compete for really smart people. You need really smart people who understand how to manipulate nanomolecules.

The margin for making mistakes has gotten much smaller. In a commodity economy, it's hard to kill off your business. You still have the mine. You still have oil wells. You can always rebuild. In a knowledge economy, if you make a mistake, you're in trouble.

The difference between humans and Neanderthals is .004 percent of gene code. That's how big the difference is, one species to another.

Three-quarters of the flags, borders and anthems sitting at the U.N. today were not there 60 some-odd years ago.

Real estate prices are way out of whack with what people earn.

The thing that's really important to understand is, the last thing an empire traditionally does is drive itself into bankruptcy. You've seen that with the great empires.

When you go and you tour Europe, or you go and you tour Egypt, or you go and you tour Iraq, or you go and you tour Afghanistan, or India, or whatever. Governments get to a point where they're illegitimate because people just give up on them as far as being leaders who have their country's interests at heart.

We have to get serious about living within our means.

Borlaug would be one figure that I think fundamentally changed India, China, all of Southeast Asia, and gave them the time to be able to build on other things.

If I had a wand and could put statues in different places, one of the statues would go to a man who just died, called Norman Borlaug, who came up with the Green Revolution.

We traditionally in this world didn't have enough calories to feed all of us and had huge famines, not just in Africa, but had them across India, across Southeast Asia, and across China. Because of Borlaug's work at Simit and because of this we have huge excess, until very recently, in agricultural produce and the prices went through the floor.

China has, all of a sudden, found a way of putting the best of the best to work to build an economy that is growing at 10% to 12% per year, and now India is following. And those changes and how quickly they've come out of this mess, how little debt they have, is really important.

The U.S. started with no stars. In fact, it started with a completely different flag. The last two were added in 1959, Hawaii and Alaska.

Ask your friends how many stars will be in the U.S. flag in 50 years? And the reason why that's a reasonable question is because there has never been a President of the United States who's been buried under the same flag he was born under.

It's important to begin to even consider whether countries can become something that looks very different because people tend to take their countries for granted.

As countries appear and disappear, then I began to ask, what makes countries successful? And it turns out, after a long slog through geographies and ethnicities and all kinds of variables, it's the ability to adapt and adopt, what Darwin talked about.

The difference between people who can read and write and those who can't is just absolutely astronomical.

The definition of who's literate and who's not keeps changing. So, in Neanderthal times, if you painted on a cave wall, that was enough to transmit how you hunt, how you eat, how you cook, how you dress, and we can read about that.

I've always been interested in why countries appear and disappear. And the curious thing is how often it happens.

Anytime you bring a really powerful new technology to market there are multiple implications. You start changing the relative position of countries.

When you brought the digital revolution in, all of a sudden, you could build a country like Singapore and take that country, which had the income per capita of Ghana in 1965, and make it something similar to the United States in one generation.

The Americas has been a relatively stable continent. The last truly new border we have is Panama in 1903.

During a period of time when Italy is talking about splitting northern and southern Italy, France is talking about splitting with Corsica and Normandy, England is talking about splitting with Wales and Scotland and England. And it goes on and on and on.

One of the things that really worries me, in part about Mexico, in part about Latin America, and in part about the Hispanic population in the U.S. and Canada. It's the lack of awareness of this whole science world.

When I grew up, I simply didn't have mentors that said, "Science is important. Science helps you build a country. Science makes a country powerful." And that's such a simple thought, but when you think about what's powered Taiwan and Korea and Silicon Valley and Cambridge.

If you depend on a single industry, if you don't continuously upgrade it, if that industry is not producing real wealth, if it's simply shuffling paper from here to here in a very efficient manner sometimes, that's not enough and that's not where you begin to get the rest of your jobs.

It is important that New York, in addition to its fashion, and finance, and tourism, and communications infrastructure, also begin developing venture infrastructure that's for real.

The thing that keeps me most awake is the desire and curiosity to learn more.

There is so much extraordinary opportunity if you're curious, if you're interested.

It's not fear that keeps me up. I mean, every generation has thought, this is the worst generation; the world's going to hell in a hand basket. The reality is, people are living longer, and they're living better.

There has to be some more regulation. But our kids have this incredible buffet of they can work in genomics, they can work in pre-omics, or they can work in robotics, or they can work in this, or they can work in that. And within the next five years there will be entirely new industries that come out of nowhere that kids are working in that would have been inconceivable when they started college. Not when we started college.

It's such an extraordinary time to be alive that you just don't want to miss it. I mean, it's a really neat historical period.

There's a creativity, a power, an energy, an ability to do things unlike any other period in history. It's a little bit like sitting in the Renaissance, but multiplied a thousand-fold.

If you had a front row seat at the Renaissance, you would have seen Machiavelli come by plotting, and you would have seen murders in the streets, you would have seen violence, you have seen people burning books and it would have looked like the world was a horrible place, but that's where all these incredible stuff we're still living with comes out of.

One of the lessons that I hope people will take out is the extreme dependence simply on the financial sector is really dangerous.

The housing crisis may not be the worst thing that's happened to New York City because it was becoming impossible for some of the young doctors, for some of the young artists, for some of the people that make the city so special to be able to live here.

Until African-Americans and Hispanics can get serious, not just about area studies, which are important, but also about science and technology, they're not going to generate that wealth and that job within those communities. And that has absolutely devastating consequences for the places where people live, for the jobs and for the wealth.

There are few jobs in the world that are more fun than being the head of Urban Development for a great and thriving city.

Within the United States, there is a real division between the PhDs given in science and math to the Asian community, to the traditional white community, and then to African-Americans and Hispanics.

Cities are magical things. You know the energy in them. You have to walk the streets in any borough here and you can see between what was in this city in the 1970's and where it is today and how much more energy there is and how much more just sheer.

If you don't have that science and technology and brains as an input, as you don't have in large parts of Latin America, if you don't focus your education on that, if you don't find your 10,000 best scientists, but you do find your 10,000 best soccer players, the consequences are, you become a World Cup Champion in Soccer, like Brazil, but you don't become Korea, which earned 1/5 of what a Mexican did in 1975 and today earns five times more.

There are certain zip codes that generate a disproportionate share of patents, of startups, of wealth, of jobs. And it's really important if other parts of the country are going to want to create these tech centers.

Venture capital is about .02% of the U.S. economy invested, and it accounts for 11% of total U.S. jobs and 21% of U.S. economic output. And the reason why is because these companies can get very big, very quickly.

There is a massive ecosystem that has to get built that looks like a biosphere. And the various parts of that biosphere better be there.

New York City is a fascinating place because it's very good at using the energy in attracting some of the best and the brightest from everywhere.

We are beginning to shift into life code. And in the process of shifting into life code, every life form on this planet is coded in a double helix with a sugar phosphate backbone. And that codes whether you become a bacteria, an orange, a lemon, a Lemur, a Cow, a sheep, a human being, a politician, any one of these things is all coded in this four-letter code.

As from the 1970's onward, digital code started to drive the global economy, now life code is beginning to be the fundamental driver of the global economy over the next 10, 20, 30 years.

There's always a question when you invest. Are you too early, are you too late, or are you just right? And there was a lot of hype about life sciences, around the sequencing of the human genome and a lot of people concluded that's not really there. But by the way, there was a lot of hype around the digital revolution just about the time of 2000 and the human genome, and it turns out that some of the world's biggest, most powerful companies are the survivors post that crash.

Not only are we reading life code, we're beginning to copy it through cloning, and we're beginning to write, and in the measure that we do that, boy, you can build a lot of very powerful companies in a short period of time.

People thought this was a computer IT gig, and that will flow through those nerdy departments and it won't come into fashion photography, it won't come into television, it won't come into my daily communications, it won't come into my telephone, my microphone, my light control, my microwave radio, my - I mean, just name it.

Try to live without something digital - without digital code for about two hours, very hard to do if you're awake.

It's actually very hard to find an area of the economy that doesn't fundamentally change in the measure that we are able to read and write life code.

It's not going to surprise me if our kids end up running on the beach in Florida when they're 100 years old on regrown body parts with a much higher quality of life than we can begin to imagine.

We're beginning to enter an era where it gets really cheap and really fast to begin to do things like make fuels, and make textiles, and make extra teeth for ourselves. And we're beginning to think about how we regrow our bladders.

After a lot of debate and a lot of work, what people decided is, it makes a great deal of sense to be open in the system and allow people to begin to build better flu vaccines. I mean, we're still making them in eggs that come out of chickens. And we can see the consequences of that with the current H1N1 lack of vaccines.

Since the 1940s, we've been saying there are no differences, we [humans] are all identical. We're going to know at year end if that is true.

When you brought the Industrial Revolution in, all of a sudden India and China went from being the dominant global powers to being powers dominated by those who understood how to apply this new technology.

I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis: ... a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species.

It's not completely inconceivable that someday you'll be able to download your own memories.

Those of us of a certain age grew up expecting that by now we would have Rosie the Robot from 'The Jetsons' in our house. And all we've got is a Roomba.