As the Future Catches You

January 1, 2001
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.

September 1, 2001
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)