Diego del Alcázar Benjumea

"Learning is an innate part of the human experience. Like light, the quest for knowledge can be confined, but it can never be extinguished"

As CEO of IE University, Diego del Alcázar Benjumea plays a key role in leading the institution to fulfil its purpose of fostering positive change through education, research and innovation.

Since 2014, he sits on the board of Headspring, a joint venture created by IE Business School and the Financial Times Group to design and implement customized education for companies. Passionate about entrepreneurship, he is co-founder and member of the board of the South Summit, the leading startup and innovation conference in Europe and Latin America, which celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2022. In 2017, he was awarded the David Rockefeller Fellowship, in recognition of his active leadership role in civic and public affairs. Previously consultant at Bain & Company, he also co-founded Step Up Capital, a vehicle to identify, invest, and manage business opportunities.

Diego del Alcázar Benjumea holds an MBA from INSEAD Business School and a double degree in Law and Business Administration from Madrid’s Complutense University. His areas of expertise are Education, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, Digital Transformation, Humanities, and Governance of Change.

Knowledge is light. It floods darkness and makes it bright and, most importantly, it never stays still. Light is always moving forward.

La genética del tiempo

The genetic of time

Written in Spanish

“Don’t you think we are playing God?”

A novel that anticipates the challenges genetic editing will present if we use it to improve human nature.

In the year 2072, Sofía has transformed her grandparents’ medieval home into the headquarters of GENE, a school for genetically edited teenagers with above-average IQs. One of the school’s main objectives is to help these teens address the era’s greatest ethical dilemma: What are the consequences of being able to alter the code of life, DNA, at will? Should we play God?

Fifty years earlier, her grandmother, Mercedes de Grijalba, an international businesswoman and founder of one of the most important pharmaceutical empires of the 21st century, became one of the key figures in the revolution triggered by the questionable decisions she made to help her sick daughter, Clara.

“La genética del Tiempo” (The Genetic of Time in English), the debut novel by Diego del Alcázar Benjumea, is a thriller that immerses us in a world that is not as utopian as it seems, entertaining us while prompting reflection on the dilemmas posed—and that will be posed—by the advanced use of biotechnology.

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