Future Visions

JAMES WATSON President, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Francis Crick and I brought together chemistry and biology. The next century will bring together biology and psychology. In the past, I never wanted to learn psychology because I didn't think its proponents had a solid basis for what they claimed. Now we're going to begin to understand behavior from a genetic point of view.

The biggest medical dilemma facing most humans may soon be our masses of fat. One would hope that as we begin to dissect hunger at the molecular level, we can control our weight with safe pills rather than will. People can't resist food--we didn't evolve for food being cheap; we evolved for food being scarce. So we may need science to save us from our human nature. Food without fat--it's like sex without having babies, and you know how great a revolution that triggered.

DAVID BALTIMORE President, California Institute of Technology

Incredible things will happen a half-century from now. We'll have cellular therapies--the use of cells, either genetically engineered or natural--to treat disease. We'll be building organs in cell culture and replacing worn-out or diseased organs. We'll be putting into our bodies adult stem cells that are modified and allow the body to make new kinds of therapeutic agents never made before.

It will be a different kind of medicine, used in attacking AIDS and cancer as well as in organ replacements. It will basically be used for all currently intractable diseases. Drugs will be more specific, more powerful, and they will come from a much deeper knowledge of the relevant biology. They won't be shots in the dark as some are today.

FRANCIS COLLINS Director, National Human Genome Research Institute

I think it's safe to say we will have individualized, preventive medical care based on our own predicted risk of disease as assessed by looking at our DNA. By then each of us will have had our genomes sequenced because it will cost less than $100 to do that. And this information will be part of our medical record. Because we will still get sick, we'll still need drugs, but these will be tailored to our individual needs. They'll be based on a new breed of designer drugs with very high efficacy and very low toxicity, many of them predicted by computer models.

NANCY WEXLER Professor of Neuropsychology, Columbia University

In 50 years, I think we will have more nanotechnology. Nanotechnology will allow us to spread medical advances throughout the world more completely, because the solutions will be so tiny that it will be possible to distribute treatments so that developing countries can take advantage of them better than they do today.

I think we will also see more personalized medicine--knowing your own genome and being able to choose what part you want to look at and what part you don't. I can't imagine we will be in a complete Utopia. Utopia doesn't fit our personality.

MATT RIDLEY Author of Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

One of the most far-reaching developments will be the discovery of the genes that cause us to age. Once we understand those genes, we will be able to counteract them. Then we will slow down the aging process dramatically. My great-grandchildren might live to 150 and not look very old at the end of it.

The social and economic consequences will be striking. Careers would potentially go on forever, and there's no particular reason why people should retire. People would delay having children in order to keep their career and mating options open. If you could quite happily have your first child in your 50s or 60s, a lot of people would do that, and population growth would start to fall very rapidly.

LEE SILVER Professor, Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University

Fifteen years ago, I WOULD have put limits on what we would ever be able to do to alter our genes. Now I believe there are no limits--no technical limits anyway. Within the next half-century, and probably much sooner, we will have a complete understanding of what every gene does. We will also be able to repair individual genomes by replacing defective genes. This so-called germ-line genetic engineering is currently viewed with horror, but that will change as people realize that fixing the faulty gene that causes Huntington's disease in all future generations, for example, is a good thing.

It's also hard to imagine forbidding people to give their children the gene that currently protects about 1% of the population from developing AIDS when infected with HIV. Where it gets trickier is when we figure out what are the naturally occurring genes that put some people at the upper end of the statistical bell curve for intelligence or talent of some kind. It's human nature to give your kids any advantage you can, and once this becomes theoretically possible, the pressure to allow it will become enormous. I suspect it won't be cheap, even in 50 years, but it might be on a par with buying a car, which means it will become widespread through the middle class, at least in rich countries like the U.S.

RAY KURZWEIL Inventor and author of The Age of Spiritual Machines

Within a quarter-century, we will have completed the reverse engineering of the human brain and will understand its principles of operation. We can then implement similar "biologically inspired" methods of information processing using far more powerful computational technology. This will combine our human strengths in pattern recognition and emotional and artistic intelligence with the speed, capacity and knowledge sharing of machines.

The emergence in the early 21st century of this new form of intelligence, one that can compete with and ultimately significantly exceed human intelligence, will have profound implications for all aspects of human endeavor, including the nature of work, learning, government, warfare, the arts and our concept of ourselves. Our biological intelligence is for all practical purposes fixed, whereas nonbiological intelligence is at least doubling in power every year, so by 2053, it will dominate.