The computer revolution, the biomolecular revolution, and the quantum revolution. In a single generation, the cost of decoding a human gene has dropped from millions of dollars to around a hundred bucks. The cost of storing a megabyte of data has dropped from hundreds of dollars to essentially nothing. The ubiquity of the internet has rendered geography meaningless. The major issue is that change was with us before, but it was incremental, reached equilibrium and then happened again in degrees.
Today there is much less equilibrium.
It is well to remember that not all areas of endeavor will be affected equally. One has only to read about the slow acceptance of high definition TV compared with the boom in digital photography, the lack of impact of the internet on the real estate brokers role, compared with the role of the insurance salesmen or car salesman, and the slow growth in digital books, to realize that the common thread of constraint in all of these is the intense personal involvement of the user, buyer or recipient. Patients fall in this category and the health professions must remember this. As our very special school begins the next century we should recall that our present and future has been built by all those who preceded us. Harvard University changing the Harvard Dental School to the Harvard School of Dental medicine in 1945 echoed the importance of research and discovery for healthcare and dentistry.