Product Description

You will never look at the world in the same way after reading As the Future Catches You. Juan Enriquez puts you face to face with a series of unprecedented political, ethical, economic, and financial issues, dramatically demonstrating the cascading impact of the genetic, digital, and knowledge revolutions on your life.

Genetics will be the dominant language of this century. Those who can “speak it” will acquire direct and deliberate control over all forms of life. But most countries and individuals remain illiterate in what is rapidly becoming the greatest single driver of the global economy.

Wealth will be more concentrated and those with knowledge to sell–both countries and individuals–will be the winners.

Consider what will happen when:
• Your genetic code can be digitally imprinted on an ID card and your insurance company and employer see that you are genetically disposed to, say, heart disease.
• Pharmaceutical products are developed so that you can eat genetically modified broccoli to protect yourself from cancer.
• Cloning will be as common as in vitro fertilization and scientists can influence the genetic design not only of other species but of your own children.
• Creating wealth no longer requires many hands. Lone individuals are giving birth to entire new industries that rapidly become bigger than the economies of most countries on earth, but create very few jobs.

As the Future Catches You resembles no other book. A typical page may contain just a few dozen words. But each seemingly discrete fact is like a chip in an intellectual mosaic that reveals its meaning and beauty only as you step back and see the big picture. Juan Enriquez is like the best teacher you ever had, one who helps you to see something in a new light and makes you say, “Now I get it!”

Juan Enriquez’s main point is that technology is not kind, it does not say “please,” but slams into existing systems and destroys them while creating new ones. Countries and individuals can either surf new and powerful waves of change–or get crushed trying to stop them.

The future is catching us all.

Let it catch you with your eyes wide open.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #476956 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-16
• Released on: 2001-10-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

From Amazon.com
In As the Future Catches You, Juan Enriquez of the Harvard Business School attempts to capture the trajectory of technological progress and understand the forces shaping our social and economic futures. Enriquez argues that February 2, 2001--the date that anyone with Internet access could contemplate the entire human genome--is akin to 1492 and Columbus's discovery of America. Instead of a new continent however, Enriquez sees the alphabet of DNA (A, adenine; T, thymine; C, cytosine; and G, guanine) and predicts that it will be the "dominant language and economic driver of this century." While none of the ideas presented here are entirely new, As the Future Catches You stands out because of Enriquez's ability to view and connect trends--genomics in particular--in a way that just about anyone can understand. Eye-popping typography and graphics coupled with a compact and almost poetic writing style make this thought-provoking book one to savor. Highly recommended. --Harry C. Edwards

From Publishers Weekly
Harvard Business School research fellow Juan Enriquez has great enthusiasm for his subject and his audience in As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth. "I would like you and I to have a conversation," he writes. "There is space on each page for your own notes, thoughts," etc. Space indeed, and more: this consideration of scientific advancement, technological and economic trends and their effects offers graphically arresting pages complete with pictures, highlighted words, graphs, and large blank margins. Enriquez's hyperventilating presentation (how many ellipses can one author use?) might get in the way of the facts at times, but the facts about the ability of genetically modified bananas to vaccinate those who consume them against particular diseases, for example can be very interesting indeed.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The ratio 390:1, in large-point type, occupies nearly an entire page in Enriquez's oddly but purposefully designed book. He aims to alert the somnolent and alarm the complacent about the economic and business consequences of the emerging revolution in science and technology. Factoids similar to that ratio (which is the productivity of the richest versus the poorest countries) pop up in eye-catching graphics. Harnessed as an exhortation to students and entrepreneurs, the information presented here is fairly basic concerning recent developments in genomics, information technology, and nanotechnology, but the author must sense that awareness of them is dim, let alone an understanding of their implications for an individual's and a country's prosperity. Wealth increasingly derives from the creation and control of information, rather than natural resources, and Enriquez effectively emphasizes that point by citing statistics on patent applications--many companies in the U.S. exceed whole continents in getting them. His prescription for alleviating the world wealth gap: study science and technology; the alternative is comparative impoverishment in the wake of this phase of capitalism's "creative destruction." An innovative presentation. Gilbert Taylor
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