BIF-3 Storyteller Denise Caruso: Lighting Candles in Dark Places
I'm half way through Denise Caruso's book Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet . This must-read book almost didn't make it into publication save for Denise's tenacity. It's is a harsh assessment of how little we know about the risks of genetic engineering. She worked on the manuscript in stealth mode for four years in fear that the biotech industry would get wind of it and snipe at it. In the end, her manuscript wasn't accepted by the publisher but armed with encouragement from friends and colleagues she took matters into her own hands, raised money, and published it on her own.
Intervention is well-written which isn't surprising to anyone familiar with Denise. She's has been writing for more than 20 years and her thoughts and analysis have reached hundreds of thousands of readers. No matter what the topic, her underlying themes have remained constant: ask more questions, listen to each other and be thoughtful about what you do in the world.
Today, she's a New York Times columnist, author and founder of The Hybrid Vigor Institute, a non-profit that brings together experts from disparate backgrounds to collaborate on common problems.
She'll be sharing her story at the BIF-3 summit on October 10th and 11th. You can read more about Denise by following this blog entry.
Denise Caruso: Lighting Candles in Dark Places
Born in Detroit to blue-collar parents who are “great problem-solvers,” Caruso learned at an early age to ask the next question and never take a statement at face value. These guiding principles have had a profound effect on her career.
Having dropped out of college after two years, Caruso ended up as a switchboard operator at a local newspaper in San Luis Obispo, California. Intrigued by the goings-on in the newsroom, she “badgered” the managing editor into giving her a shot at being a journalist. He finally said yes—as long as she agreed to finish school.
“The greatest gift anyone had given me,” she says.
Caruso graduated from California Polytechnic State University in 1981 and moved to San Francisco in the early days of the PC industry.
After two years writing for trade magazines, she was asked to start a column on technology for the Sunday San Francisco Examiner called “Inside Silicon Valley.”
From that vantage point, Caruso got to know the companies inventing the next generation of technology, including pre-World Wide Web networks and what then was called “multimedia.” She became one of a small handful of people who could see the disruptive force these technologies would become.
“People were so focused on what was right under their noses that they couldn’t fathom what was about to hit them,” Caruso says. “I knew their worlds were about to change, and I wanted to help them take advantage of it.”
The newsletter she edited, Digital Media, is still fondly recalled by industry pioneers as the publication that foresaw and ushered in the Internet era.
“It was exciting,” she says. “Entire industries were transformed, and we were in the trenches right alongside them.”
In 1995, after nearly 10 years as the go-to person for the “digital convergence,” Caruso was asked to write the Digital Commerce column for the New York Times. Five years later, two weeks before the dot-com boom busted, she’d had enough.
Resigning her Times column, she started Hybrid Vigor Institute. Hybrid Vigor was born of a meeting between Caruso and an MIT computer scientist. While evaluating a design for the first high-definition TV camera, he discovered several disciplines that studied human vision.
Their collective knowledge catalyzed the idea for a radically new machine vision system, which he immediately began designing.
“I felt like I got hit by lighting,” Caruso said. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to get up every morning and figure out who to put together to solve some real problems?”
In its first two years, Hybrid Vigor studied collaboration in universities and in foundations, and published two boundary-crossing white papers—one on the role of clouds in climate change, and the other on her friend’s human vision research.
The first topic that fired Caruso’s imagination was risk, particularly the risks of technology innovations like genetic engineering. After writing two papers on the subject through Hybrid Vigor, in December she published Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet.
She continues to work with academia, industry and policy experts and stakeholders to improve critical thinking about innovation risk and complex socio-scientific problems like global infectious disease.
Caruso believes that bringing experts together to solve shared problems is a powerful driver of innovation. Creating a protective environment for people to explore beyond their own expertise can be challenging, she says, but the rewards are tremendous.
“It's very difficult to train people to go into the places where it's dark. But I’m happy to sail into those dark places with them. That’s where lighting a candle can make a real difference.”
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