I have known Juan Enriquez for several decades. Now a good friend, I first met him when after attending three consecutive symposia of our EPIIC programs, as an anonymous audience member. He invited me to lunch in Harvard Square and expressed his interest in joining the Institute’s External Advisory Board. Accepting was one of the wisest decisions I made as Director.
He is one of the most intriguing people I know. A description from his TED profile:
“A broad thinker, Juan Enriquez bridges disciplines to build a coherent look ahead. He is the managing director of Excel Venture Management, a life sciences VC firm. He cofounded the company that made the world's first synthetic life form and seed funded a company that may allow portable brain reading.”
A pioneering thinker, innovative entrepreneur, and driving force in the promise and “creative destruction” of the life sciences, I think that it would be more appropriate at times to say Juan operates carefully on the “bleeding edge,” rather than simply the “cutting edge.”
Perhaps best known for his creativity in the arenas of synthetic biology and genetics, he gave substance to the concept of “genomics” as head of the Harvard Business School’s Life Sciences Project. Among his compelling books: As the Future Catches You; Homo Evolutis: Please Meet the Next Human Species; and Evolving Ourselves.
Yet Juan also writes and lectures on a much wider swath of politics, science, and international affairs. A quick review of his TED talks will attest to his extraordinary breadth of knowledge and intellectual curiosity.
He is a solid “futurist.” Sadly prescient, as we experience the radical polarization we must confront now, was one of his earliest books, The Untied States of America, on which he lectured on for one our EPIIC Outward Bound retreats.
His is a powerful ethical voice. We will host an upcoming webinar with Juan on his latest book, Right/Wrong: How Technology Transforms our Ethics. As one review has importantly cautioned in these often viciously judgmental days, it “shows why we should be a little less harsh in judging our peers and ancestors and more careful in being dead certain that what we do today will be regarded as ethical tomorrow.”
Eclecticism is a pallid word for a man active in the experimentation of transforming genes,
Shaping global institutions, and advising Presidents; who once crewed, as both a scientist and sailor, the world sailing discovery voyage following the path of Darwin to the Galapagos, led by J. Craig Venter, who sequenced the human genome, to discover a great number of new species; and who was the coordinator-general of economic policy and chief of staff for Mexico's Secretary of State, and a member of the Mexican peace commission that negotiated the cease-fire to Zapatista rebellion of the state of Chiapas.
Juan is unstinting in his efforts to educated, in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Challenging, iconoclastic, Juan was responsible for so much of the development of the Institute. He lectured in many of our colloquia, participated in many EPIIC symposia and intellectual retreats, and created professional workshops with us. His parties for our Board in the wine grotto of his Newton home, once housing small basement rooms for escapees of the Underground Railroad, were wonderful.
He first came to participate in our community in the 1998-99 EPIIC year on “Global Crime, Corruption, and Accountability” at our Outward Bound retreat at Hurricane Island in Maine. He lectured on “Dilemmas of Accountability: The Human Genome and Corruption in Mexico.”
This powerful workshop on privacy and progress in gene sequencing led to the first ever undergraduate internships for students by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
Thoughtful, gentle in criticism, probing, provocative, and intellectually daring, he has been advising, assisting, recommending students, and creating our community on every level for years.
Having watched him maneuver in our volleyball games in Truro, Cape Cod, he knows all the strategic angles, and exerts the least energy, with the most effective of results. Typical.
The best part of community - his son and mine are fast friends.
