Venture Investor Uncovers DNA of Economy
BOSTON (
) -- 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) - Get Report
,
(GOOG) - Get Report
and
Intel
(INTC) - Get Report
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
at the turn of the century, shortly before the company was bought by Hewlett Packard for $25 billion. "That's what drove that
," 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."
Excel Venture Management's portfolio includes
Synthetic Genomics
, a La Jolla, Calif., company Enriquez co-founded with three other life-sciences heavy hitters in 2005. In July, the company announced a $300 million deal with
ExxonMobil
(XOM) - Get Report
to research and develop biofuels from photosynthetic algae.
Another one to watch is
Aileron Therapeutics
in Cambridge, Mass., which, as Enriquez describes it, has developed a way to maintain the shape of peptides, which enables them to act as keys to understanding the way cellular behavior leads to diseases. He expects the company to be of interest to Big Pharma, including
GlaxoSmithKline
(GSK) - Get Report
and
Novartis
(NVS) - Get Report
. A managing director of the Novartis Venture Fund is on the board.
At the
Technology, Evolution and Design
conference held in Long Beach, Calif., in February, Enriquez predicted a next generation of humans who will be able to evolve themselves through science.
"What we're going to see is a different species of hominid," he said. "And I don't think this is a thousand years out. I think most of us are going to glance at it, and our grandchildren are going to begin to live it -- a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species. And that, of course, would be the ultimate reboot."
That said, he acknowledges that bringing life-sciences companies to life is no easy feat. "The care and feeding of geniuses is a really hard profession," he says.
"What's interesting to a businessperson and what's interesting to a scientist are not the same thing," Enriquez told an audience of geniuses on Saturday at an event honoring the 25th anniversary of the Center for Excellence in Education. The attendees largely comprised young scientists who were hatching startups at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also in Cambridge. "Almost no businessman is nearly as smart as the people in this room. And almost nobody in this room is good at business."
"We go through about three CEOs from the time the thing is invested to the time it goes to market," he says.
