QUANTA

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

“...Digital code is what drives rapid speed growth today. It allows mergers like AOL Time Warner … It drives the Internet, TV, music, finance, IT, news coverage, research, manufacturing. A few countries and companies understood the change. That is how poor countries like Finland, Singapore, and Taiwan got so wealthy … So quickly … But a lot of folks just did not learn to read and write a new language … And even though they produced more and more goods, particularly commodities … And even though they restructured companies and governments … Cut budgets, raised taxes, built large factories and buildings … They got a lot poorer. (In 1938 the richest country per person in Asia was … the Philippines. In 1954, according to the World Bank, the most promising Asian economy was … Burma. Both remain commodity economies … Both are sidelined from the digital revolution … And you probably would not like to live in either country). Your world changed when you went ‘On Line.’ One day you used a fax or e-mail … And it soon became hard to conceive of living with only snail mail. If you understood this change early … And invested or worked in some of the companies driving the digital revolution … You are probably quite well off … (as a country and/or as an individual). If you came late, as a speculator, without understanding what a digital language does, or does not do … You probably lost a lot of money during the year 2000. Your world … and your language … are about to change again. The two nucleotide base pairs that code all life …A-T, C-G … Have already led some of the world’s largest companies … Monsanto … DuPont … Novartis … IBM … Hoeschst … Compaq … GlaxoSmithKline … To declare that their future lies in life science. They have abandoned, sold, spun off core business divisions … And launched themselves into selling completely new products … Which is why so many chemical, seed, cosmetic, food, pharmaceutical companies … Are partnering, Merging, Growing. Some life-science companies will crash spectacularly … Others will get larger than Microsoft and Cisco … (Companies that are already larger than the economies of most of the world’s countries.). The world’s mega-mergers are going to be driven by digital and genetic code. Consider what is about to happen to medicine. You currently spend about nine times as much for doctors and medical interventions … As you do on medicines and prevention. In the measure that we understand how viruses, bacteria, and our bodies are programmed … And how they can be reprogrammed … Treatment will shift from emergency interventions … Toward deliberate and personalized prevention … (Just as dentistry did.). And we may end up spending just as much on pharmaceuticals as we do on doctors. These medicines do not have to be pills or injections … They could be a part of the food you eat every day, your soap or cosmetics … Perhaps you will inhale them or simply put various patches on your skin. (This is why Procter & Gamble is thinking of merging with a pharmaceutical company, why L’Oréal is hiring molecular biologists, and why Campbell’s is selling soups designed for hospital patients with specific diseases.)..."

Source and/or read more: http://3.ly/rECc

Publisher and/or Author and/or Managing Editor:__Andres Agostini ─ @Futuretronium at Twitter! Futuretronium Book at http://3.ly/rECc