Juan Enriquez Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.