JUAN ENRIQUEZ

The difference between humans and Neanderthals is .004 percent of gene code. That's how big the difference is, one species to another.

One of the good things about the public Human Genome Project is that the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health spent a part of their budget on the ethical, legal, and social implications of their research.

If you want to compete in bioinformatics, first you need to compete for really smart people. You need really smart people who understand how to manipulate nanomolecules.

The margin for making mistakes has gotten much smaller. In a commodity economy, it's hard to kill off your business. You still have the mine. You still have oil wells. You can always rebuild. In a knowledge economy, if you make a mistake, you're in trouble.

I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis:... a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species.

It's not completely inconceivable that someday you'll be able to download your own memories.

We have to make sure that when we make choices as a society, people understand the choices, agree with them, and are behind them. Otherwise, the system is going to fall apart.

In today’s world, a government that controls a vast tract of territory may be less relevant than one that supports education and embraces a regulatory framework promoting innovation and investment.

A nation’s success in the global economy is not determined by the quantity of its natural resources, but by the quality of its human resources.

State Creation: A growth Industry.

The growing tendency to justify and base governance on the grounds of maintaining economic efficiency has opened the door to secessionists who can legitimately claim that they are not reaping the benefits of economic restructuring.

The more globalized the world becomes, the less traumatic it is for nationalists to split from their states.

Throughout history, countries have sought to expand ….Today, the goal of most wars is too make countries smaller rather than larger.

The more democratic governments bow to increasing demands of the electorate and spend money on public goods and services the more disgruntled the electorate becomes.

Today, governments have more to fear from within than without

The Americas has been a relatively stable continent. The last truly new border we have is Panama in 1903.

I've always been interested in why countries appear and disappear. And the curious thing is how often it happens.

Since the 1940s, we've been saying there are no differences, we [humans] are all identical. We're going to know at year end if that is true.

Those of us of a certain age grew up expecting that by now we would have Rosie the Robot from 'The Jetsons' in our house. And all we've got is a Roomba.

The thing that's really important to understand is, the last thing an empire traditionally does is drive itself into bankruptcy. You've seen that with the great empires.

If you had a front row seat at the Renaissance, you would have seen Machiavelli come by plotting, and you would have seen murders in the streets, you would have seen violence, you have seen people burning books and it would have looked like the world was a horrible place, but that's where all these incredible stuff we're still living with comes out of.

Not only are we reading life code, we're beginning to copy it through cloning, and we're beginning to write, and in the measure that we do that, boy, you can build a lot of very powerful companies in a short period of time.

As countries appear and disappear, then I began to ask, what makes countries successful? And it turns out, after a long slog through geographies and ethnicities and all kinds of variables, it's the ability to adapt and adopt, what Darwin talked about.

There's a creativity, a power, an energy, an ability to do things unlike any other period in history. It's a little bit like sitting in the Renaissance, but multiplied a thousand-fold.

During a period of time when Italy is talking about splitting northern and southern Italy, France is talking about splitting with Corsica and Normandy, England is talking about splitting with Wales and Scotland and England. And it goes on and on and on.