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Inventing the Future

A gene-based cure for cancer. Quantum computers. Airport ESP. Safer burgers. The bold innovators in this special issue will help shape the 21st century.

One hundred years ago, scientists were grappling with the new knowledge that invisible organisms called bacteria caused disease; that the energy that emanated from radium could create images of people's bones; that atoms weren't in fact the smallest units in the universe.Since then, we've learned that space and time are relative terms; we've flown at Kitty Hawk, smashed atoms, stepped on the moon, banished smallpox, and wired the world to the Internet. It would be easy to presume that the past 100 years were the golden age of discovery.

Well, you ain't seen nothing yet. The pace of innovation in the United States is roaring and will only accelerate in the years to come. One key reason: The tools of invention are so much better than before.

Einstein worked out the theory of relativity with paper and pencil and could only speculate on the true nature of subatomic particles. Today's physicists craft their equations on desktop computers and buttress them with hard data: They've tracked neutrinos in their eccentric flight. Meteorologists use computer models to more accurately predict the course of killer hurricanes. Pharmacologists can manipulate a 3-D portrait of a drug molecule on-screen like a Tinkertoy, shaping it to match its target in the body. Astronomers armed with telescopes of awesome size and clarity have for the first time recorded the reflected light of a planet outside our solar system. (Dozens more have been detected since 1995 by charting their gravitational influence.) Into the 1980s, biologists scoffed at the suggestion that it was possible to catalog the 3 billion DNA base pairs in the human body.

In 2000, the rough draft of the human genome will be delivered, ahead of schedule, thanks to robots and high-speed computers. The marriage of machinery and computational muscle is yielding astonishing insights. Neurologists use magnetic resonance imagers to watch the brain at work, thoughts and feelings lighting up the screen like ghostly messages from the netherworld. Engineers craft tiny sensors that could detect an advancing army–or find a wandering toddler at the mall. Surgeons employ three robotic arms for open-heart surgery, minimizing the incision–and the recovery time.

And in the next few years, the tools at hand will become even more powerful. Researchers have already built a transistor so small it can hide under a virus. Machines will shrink further, entering an era of "nanotechnology" in which invisible devices just atoms wide will perform tasks as mundane as adjusting the lighting in a room–or as vital as hunting down cancer cells. Computers are in for a radical makeover, too. With the silicon-based microprocessor nearing the limit of its capabilities, researchers are devising ultrafast circuits–built not on wires and chips but on quantum particles, or even DNA.

That's hot stuff, but by all accounts the transformations afoot in telecommunications and the Internet will have a much deeper impact on society than the computer–and the effects, like the Internet itself, will grow exponentially, as being connected becomes cheaper and simpler. Already, hundreds of devices are in development to replace the much loathed PC and merge it with the telephone and television. Handheld tablets, interactive E-books, in-ear cell phones, voice-activated wearable devices–they'll be wireless, they'll be linked to each other and to the Internet, and they'll offer a vast menu. Imagine voice mail, I Love Lucy, E-shopping, techno music, high school homework assignments, and family photo albums, all accessible anywhere, anytime. Bandwidth is being stretched and stitched together to bear the traffic, with fiber-optic cable and clever wireless technology. This wild blossoming of communications, in a nice bit of synergy, feeds more innovation. Where 15 years ago only Ph.D.'s at the big research institutions could debate ideas on the Internet, now anyone with a $19.95 E-mail account can develop a notion and test it on the world.

Money flows along the same channels. The ease of communications democratizes invention as well as its risks and rewards. "We'll never be able to predict which technologies will become market successes," says Bob Lucky, an inventor of modem technology and vice president of Telcordia in Red Bank, N.J. "In a free market, you risk that if a technology works, you get your money back–and if it doesn't, you lose."

Ultimately, we will feel the transformations wrought by these innovations in our own bodies. The past few decades have seen the beginnings of a revolution in biology–the ability to manipulate human genes and cells at the molecular level. In 1998, researchers persuaded a few cells from a human embryo to grow in the lab, and those stem cells gave birth to the hope of growing tissue to repair damaged hearts and other organs or to replace them altogether. An electrode lodged in the brain of a paralyzed stroke victim lets him guide a computer cursor with his thoughts, anticipating the advent of Terminator-like meldings of man and machine. And the sequencing of the human genome promises not only to jump-start our comprehension of heredity and disease but to give us a much clearer vision of what it means to be human. Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a fabulous ride. -Nancy Shute

Molecular Electronics and Biocomputing Information Network

^{Molecular Electronics and
Biocomputing Information Network}