Our focus now is producing them quickly and efficiently. Please note that I said industry will now lead product development. Combining this biochip work with research at Argonne's Structural Biology Center and the extreme precision offered by the Advanced Photon Source, we expect that researchers soon will be able to quickly tell from DNA sequences what shapes proteins will take and how they function. And that in turn would let them predict the structure of cells and organisms. For the hypothetical cancer patient I talked about earlier, his susceptibility to the disease would have been known early in his life from results of a simple blood test and, at very minimum, the cancer would have been detected soon after it developed, with treatment begun at the best possible time.
Little thought is needed to assemble a far longer list of benefits for people, animals, and plants.
As I said earlier, our grandchildren will almost certainly live in a healthier and quite different society than we do. Self-interest, of course. What's more, they knew that we actively wanted them to lead the project into its next phase. So they perceived the rewards to be greater than the risk. And they acted.