Venture Investor Uncovers DNA of Economy

BOSTON (TheStreet) -- The key to the human genome, the genetic codes that determine everything about us including how we look, is also the driver of gross domestic product, according to Juan Enriquez, founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School and now a managing director at Excel Venture Management in Boston.

The world's leading authority on the pervasive impact of life sciences, Enriquez contends that genomics have been driving the economy in virtually every sector -- from high-tech to real estate. To those who doubt that, he points to the history of computing, arguing that genetic code is today what binary code was back then.

"If somebody had stood up in 1980 and said the ability to write in ones and zeroes was going to be the biggest driver for businesses, they would have been thrown off the stage," he says.

"But look at what Hewlett-Packard(HPQ Quote), Google(GOOG Quote) and Intel(INTC Quote) are doing with some of the largest databases in the world," he says. "A lot of computer companies are trying to figure out what their life-sciences strategies are. Anything you can code as life you can code as digits."

For starters, he points to the fact that Compaq Computer won the deal to provide the supercomputing power for the Human Genome Project at the turn of the century, shortly before the company was bought by Hewlett Packard for $25 billion. "That's what drove that merger," he says.

Enriquez ties life sciences to the housing crisis, maintaining that "the fact that you don't have a research triangle in Detroit means that the average price of a house in Detroit is $7,000. The solution in Detroit is not to fund Chrysler. It's to fund innovation."