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. Ultimately, we will feel the transformations wrought by these innovations in our own bodies. 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.