(FORTUNE Magazine) – "So, do you want to wander?"

It's a sunny September day in Los Angeles, and Juan Enriquez asks a first-time visitor whether he would like to explore the city's environs. Enriquez is talking about touring the City of Angels, but time spent with him entails a far more compelling journey--an exploration of the map of life, the human genome, and its implications for society and business.

Enriquez, 43, is director of the life-sciences project at Harvard Business School, an interdisciplinary program focused on the ways genetic engineering and technology are reshaping companies, industries, and nations. He has written a book on the subject, titled As the Future Catches You: How Genomics and Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health, and Wealth. Its layout is as demurely economical as its title--crammed with charts, bold headlines, illustrations, and enough ellipses to rival e.e. cummings, the text reminded one reviewer of a cross between Tom Peters and Ezra Pound. Yet its two key points are succinctly potent:

--Genetics is a language, like Greek or binary code, and through it we are gaining control over the evolution of all life forms. Countries (and companies) that learn to speak this language will prosper, while those that don't will fall behind.

--Advances in genetic engineering will blur boundaries between industries like agriculture, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and computing, and form a massive life-sciences industry. The world's largest company in 2020 will emerge from this group.

Enriquez's book is not just predictive but an exhortation to scientific literacy, which is unexpected because he isn't a scientist. In fact, Enriquez prefaces the book by saying that one need not possess a Ph.D.--or even a college degree--to read it. "If genomics was bound to stay in labs, I would write for folks in labs," Enriquez says. "But this affects everyone." Indeed, everyone from Microsoft to the Boston Consulting Group to land developers have invited him to lecture.

Enriquez's gift for communicating broadly may be related to his unusual pedigree. Descended on his mother's side from Boston's Cabot clan, he is also the former head of urban development in his native Mexico City. He was part of a four-person team that brokered a peace in the Chiapas peasant revolt in 1994, but he fled the country after he was told there was a price on his head. (It seems some members of the ruling PRI grew weary of his repeated calls for reform.)

Those who know Enriquez are amazed by his eclectic intellect. "He'll pull on what appear to be unrelated matters and find the thread, and you realize the tension that lies between them and how they could profoundly affect each other," says Janice Bourque, president of the Massachusetts Biotech Council. He's soft-spoken yet charismatic, "the kind of guy who makes you sit forward in your chair so you don't miss anything," says Gregory Peterson, a PR consultant to biotech firms. And he's unpretentious. Though he makes upwards of $20,000 per speech, he still cruises around Cambridge in a six-year-old Toyota with a cracked windshield.

"Sometimes you need a deep thinker to remind you that you're part of something really unusual," says Michael Gilman, senior VP of research at $1-billion-a-year biopharmaceutical firm Biogen, which hired Enriquez to address its executives. "His speech was just riveting because it put the work that we did in a much broader context."

Unusual, indeed. Imagine a $150 million drug factory being replaced by a herd of goats whose milk has been genetically engineered to produce proteins to battle arthritis, AIDS, and cancer. It's happening at companies like GTC Biotherapeutics, which has more than a dozen medicinal-milk programs underway and one in clinical trials (for patients with hereditary deficiency in antithrombin, which helps regulate blood clotting).

While medicinal milk is not available just yet at the local supermarket, few people realize how much of what we eat is bioengineered. One-third of those surveyed in August by the International Food Information Council believed that there were no foods produced through biotech in the grocery store. In fact, about a third of the corn and almost three-quarters of the soybeans produced in the U.S. are genetically modified, according to the USDA. Worldwide, the total acreage of genetically modified crops jumped 30-fold between 1996 and 2001.

As the agriculture sector was one of the first to experience the changes wrought by genomics, it has been very receptive to Enriquez's ideas. "[He] brought together for me a lot of things I knew but hadn't assembled," says Dave Knau, global director of marketing communications at seed supplier Pioneer Hi-Bred, which chemical giant DuPont swallowed up in 1999. "A lot of scientists will talk about the benefits of science. He says how that knowledge transforms us as societies and economies in a way that a lot of scientists never look at. Or at least never talk about."

Enriquez's prediction that genomics will scramble traditional business boundaries has, in fact, coincided with a round of mergers between agricultural, chemical, and pharmaceutical concerns, most recently Bayer's $6.6 billion purchase of Aventis CropScience in June. Yet some biotech analysts remain skeptical of Enriquez's life-sciences manifesto, saying you can't just cram disparate businesses under one umbrella. The Nasdaq biotech index has lost half its value this year, souring investors, and continued consumer apprehension about genetically modified foods (vociferous in Europe) hasn't helped. Enriquez says his detractors either don't get it or have their heads in the sand. "I don't think analysts have sat down and understood how broad this thing is," he says. "Most companies that attempt to do this are going to go broke," but those that ignore it will even more surely fail. As Biogen's Gilman puts it, "This stuff is changing my life today, but it's going to change everyone's life in ten to 20 years."

A collector of maps (his rambling Victorian home is full of them), Enriquez is giddy about his latest project--a map of where genetic data flows in the world. He's also finishing a book that will detail the effects of globalization on the Americas. He would like to start his own business, but he's in no rush. There are still millions of people to guide to the genetic frontier. --Matthew Boyle