The modern age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix. The earthly rhythms that characterize a more pastoral way of life have been shunted aside to make room for the fast track of an urbanized existence. Lost in a sea of perpetual technological transition, modern man and woman find themselves increasingly alienated from the ecological choreography of the planet.

Being both entrepreneurial and social is no longer an oxymoron, but rather a tautology.

It is not uncommon to suppose that the free exchange of property in markets and capitalism are one and the same. They are not. While capitalism operates through the free market, free markets don't require capitalism.

What's really clear to all of us in the business community is that GDP is slowing everywhere. And the reason is productivity has been declining now for 15 or 20 years all over the world. So we've got very high unemployment, and it's structural. And it's compounded by real-time climate change - that's really a game changer.

Europe will not accept genetically modified foods. It doesn't make any difference in the final analysis what Brussels does, what Washington does, or what the World Trade Organization does.

It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there's no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic.

We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.