The Age of Disruption

By: Alan M. WebberWed Dec 19, 2007 at 8:39 AM

Still not convinced that there's much "new" about the new economy? Then spend some time with Harvard's Juan Enriquez. In his new book, and in an interview, he explains how business and economics are changing -- and what it means for you.

Gene Dreams

The genomics revolution is at the heart of much of your book and is also the focus of your project at Harvard Business School. For nonscientists, how should we think about genomics and business?

The first thing you need to know is that an orange is the same thing as a floppy disk. When you think of a floppy disk, it's a container with a string of ones and zeros. The plastic around it doesn't matter -- all that matters is that it's a source code. If you take a keystroke on your computer, when you punch that keystroke, you're changing one string of ones and zeros and substituting another. That will change a letter; it will add instead of subtract; it will send an email; it will create an image. That ability to modify a series of bits inside the plastic casing of that floppy disk is what powers the global economy today. Last year, it accounted for 19.1% of U.S. economic growth.

Now, in 1995, a scientist named Craig Venter found a way of describing an entire life-form as a string of nucleotides that form DNA. He wrote the source code for a living thing. Imagine that you have the source code for an orange -- it's contained in the orange's floppy disk, a seed. That floppy disk falls to the ground, and the source code starts to give instructions: Put out a root; put out a stem; build a leaf that looks like this. If you have the source code and you understand how it's written, then you can modify what a plant form does. That gives us direct and deliberate control over the evolution of every species on this planet. And that is going to be the greatest single driver of the global economy.

Is this sci-fi, or is this part of business today?

This is going to happen very quickly -- in fact, it's already happening. A company that didn't exist four years ago -- Celera -- now has the largest private computer in the world. It has one of the largest databases in the world -- it has about eight Libraries of Congress of data sitting inside its basement. It has become one of the largest users of electricity in the state of Maryland. This is a competition where companies that didn't exist five years ago are going to become dominant global players.

Let me give you an example. When you go camping, one of the things that happens from time to time is that as you're walking through the forest, a spider will appear in front of your face. You can't figure out where that spider is coming from, because the forest canopy is 30 feet up. Of course, when you look closely, you see that the spider is hanging from a single thread of spider silk.

To you and me, that's interesting. The U.S. Army sees that, and it thinks, "I'd like to have more of that material." Because spider silk is very strong -- it's four times as strong as Kevlar. Now, they could try to send army privates into the forest to milk the spiders, but that's very inefficient. But what they can do is to take source code for spider silk, change the source code for a goat, and make the goat produce spider silk protein in its milk. Then, when you milk the goat, you have spider silk.

The next Cisco Systems, the next Microsoft is going to be a life-sciences company. It could be a company that today calls itself a computer company: IBM's largest project is Blue Gene. Sun Microsystems's largest project is deciphering protein. Compaq Computer's driver is the alpha chips used for sequencing a human genome. So it may be a computer company. But it may be a cosmetics company. One of the reasons that Procter & Gamble tells Wall Street that it's going to merge with a pharmaceutical company is that for the first time in 4,000 years, a cosmetic company may be able to deliver what it promises: different skin, younger-looking eyes, a whole series of things that you can achieve without plastic surgery, because we are beginning to understand the human genome.

What businesses will be touched by the genomics revolution?

This is going to change energy companies, computing companies, cosmetics companies, mining companies. It will change how pharmaceutical companies operate. A pharmaceutical factory is almost like a beer factory. There are large fermentation vats in vast facilities. It's very expensive to make long molecules inside of metal vats because they're fragile and they tend to break. So the fermentation process is delicate. Now, it turns out that living things -- you and I, for example -- are very good at making long molecules. Our bodies are collections of long molecules. So what companies like Genzyme Corp. are doing is, instead of building their next factory like the one that's here in Cambridge, they've engineered a single herd of goats in western Massachusetts. Now Genzyme Transgenics Corp. produces everything that factory produces in one herd of goats.