Innovation Blog

Science Breakthroughs by 2020:  20/20 Vision?

By Shlomo Maital

 In its Jan. 7  issue, the science weekly Nature [1] asked leading scientists to predict the coming decade’s developments in their field.  Here are some of their views:

   Internet:  Google research director Peter Norvig:

 ¨  Content will be a mix of text, speech, still and video images, histories of interactions with colleagues, friends, information sources and their automated proxies, and tracks of sensor readings from Global Positioning System devices, medical devices and other embedded sensors in our environment

     ¨  The majority of search queries will be spoken, not typed, and an experimental minority will be through direct monitoring of brain signals.  …   The results we get back will be a synthesis, not just a list.   A decade from now, the result will summarize the major approaches, contrast their differences, automatically translate any foreign documents into my language, and then rank the results by efficacy or place them in a table or chart as appropriate.  

 Personalized medicine:  David B. Goldstein,  Duke University

   ¨      ….here’s one confident but uncomfortable prediction of what personalized genomics could look like in 2020. The identification of major risk factors for disease is bound to substantially increase interest in embryonic and other screening programmes. Society has largely already accepted this principle for mutations that lead inevitably to serious health conditions. Will it be so accommodating of those who want to screen out embryos that carry, say, a twentyfold increased risk of a serious but unspecified neuropsychiatric disease?

     ¨  Some advances will be relatively uncontroversial, such as the development of tailored therapeutic drugs based on genetic differences that are otherwise innocuous. Others will be transformational, such as the identification of definitive genetic risk factors that provide new drug targets for conditions that are often poorly treated such as schizophrenia, epilepsy and cancers.

 Energy:  Daniel M. Kammen,  Director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley

  ¨  By 2020, humankind needs to be solidly on to the path of a low-carbon society — one dominated by efficient and clean energy technologies. It is essential to put a price on carbon emissions, through either well-managed cap-and-trade schemes or carbon taxes. Creative financing will also be needed so that homes and businesses can buy into energy efficiency and renewable energy services without having to pay up front. An example is the Property-Assessed Clean Energy financing mechanism, which my lab is helping to design and promote.

 ¨  Deployed widely, these kinds of [alternative energy] solutions and the development of a smart grid would mean that by 2020 the world would be on the way to an energy system in which solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric power will supply more than 80% of electricity.

Global governance:  Jeffrey Sachs,  Director, the Earth Institute

¨  By 2020, the world needs an effective system of global governance for managing sustainable development. It will require systematic improvements in four areas.

¨  First, politics must take account of technical expertise. In international negotiations such as the Copenhagen climate process, negotiators spend a lot of time arguing over the legalities of agreements but little time discussing technological options.   

¨  Second, public and private investments in new technologies should be managed as part of an integrated system. Almost all environmental challenges, from greenhouse-gas emissions to the depletion of groundwater resources, demand technological transformation. Achieving this will need a mix of public and private enterprise.  

¨  Third, corporate lobbying must be restrained: it is one of the greatest dangers to sustainable development. In the United States, corporate influence through lobbying, campaign funding and misleading advocacy campaigns has been an enormous obstacle to effective regulation of the economy and environment.  

¨ Finally, global financing for poorer countries must improve if international agreements on climate, land use and biodiversity are to succeed. The record of aid delivery to poor countries is dismal.  

 Synthetic biology: George Church, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School

¨ In the past decade, the cost of reading and writing DNA has dropped a million-fold, outstripping even Moore’s law for exponentially increasing computer power. The challenge for the next decade will be to integrate molecular engineering and computing to make complex systems. The development of engineering standards for biological parts, such as how pieces of DNA snap together, will permit computer-aided design (CAD) at levels of abstraction from atomic to population scales. Biologists will have access to tools that will allow them to arrange atoms to optimize catalysis, for example, or arrange populations of organisms to cooperate in making a chemical.

¨ The obvious application will be in manufacturing and delivering drugs more efficiently. However, these treatments might be superseded by smarter ones, such as oral vaccines and ‘programmable’ personal stem cells or bacteria (which exploit sensors, logic and actuators harvested from natural and lab evolution) that could, for example, sense a nearby tumour, coordinate an attack and drill into the cancer cells to release toxins. Another application is in the production of chemicals, biofuels and foods — for example, the development of parasite-resistant crops or photosynthetic organisms that can double their biomass in just three hours. As costs drop, such technology will allow developing nations to leapfrog fertilizer-wasting, fossil-fuel-intensive and disease-rife farming for cleaner, more efficient systems, just as they are leapfrogging costly landlines in favour of mobile-phone networks.

¨  As electronic chips hit conventional manufacturing limits, they will be replaced by atomically precise and fault-tolerant biological circuits. Three-dimensional ‘bio-printers’ could make nearly all manufactured goods much less expensive. The grand challenge will be to anticipate the many unintended consequences of the synthetic biology revolution — ecological, economic and social — and to safeguard against them.

Universities: John L. Hennessy, President, Stanford University

¨  Perhaps the largest threat to our research universities over the next decade is the financial challenge facing governments. In the United States, for example, budget deficits have caused many states to reduce their funding for public universities, and at the federal level, there is likely to be no growth or a cut in funding for research programmes.

¨ To address these financial and intellectual challenges, universities need to be willing to change how they see their research and teaching mission. The scale and complexity of today’s global problems demand a more collaborative, multidisciplinary approach.

 ¨ Traditionally, universities have been structured around disciplines and departments. The agencies that fund research often reflect that structure in their financial support of projects. That rigidity can be a barrier to innovation, and to the need to educate students for a more collaborative working environment.  Therefore, universities and funding agencies need to encourage working across disciplines — for example, through academic centres based around broad themes rather than narrow fields. The challenge will be to do this without abandoning the traditional disciplines and the role they have in ensuring excellence.

¨ As financial pressures increase, institutions may be forced to make difficult decisions — prioritizing areas in which they have sufficient existing strength or student interest and collaborating with peer institutions that have greater capability in other fields. Continuing support for fledgling cross-disciplinary efforts in difficult financial circumstances will require vigilance.

[1]   Nature 463, 26-32 (7 January 2010)  Published online 6 January 2010