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. 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.
Computers are in for a radical makeover, too.
Already, hundreds of devices are in development to replace the much loathed PC and merge it with the telephone and television. 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. Money flows along the same channels. The ease of communications democratizes invention as well as its risks and rewards.