[This lecture is based on interviews with 150 of the world’s top scientists, many of them Nobel Laureates or directors of major scientific laboratories, about their conception of the science of the next 20 to 50 years. Many of these predictions are contained in my book, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century. Of course, errors will be made, but the predictions in this article are not mere idle speculation, but reflect a fairly accurate description by the experts in biotechnology about the evolution of their field.]
Back in the 1980s, when the idea of the Human Genome Project was first proposed by a handful of biologists, the overwhelming reaction was negative, with scientists arguing that it would be prohibitively expensive and would consume too much time and resources. Only a handful of genes had been sequenced, at great expense, and many felt that a crash project to sequence the entire human genome would be impractical and adversely affect funding for other worthwhile projects.
Today, we realize that many of these pessimistic predictions were incorrect in part because of Moore’s Law. The biology of gene sequencing has now been automated and roboticized, with the power of computers doubling every 18 months and results being shared instantly on the internet. This is one of the most important factors driving the ever-accelerating pace of biotechnology. This, in turn, has translated into a new Moore’s Law for biotechnology: that the number of genes which are sequenced doubles every year. This means that the cost of sequencing a DNA base pair went down from $5 per base pair to a few cents today. Within 20 years, we may have personalized DNA sequencing and also an “encyclopedia of life” in which all major life forms are decoded.
This new Moore’s Law, in turn, allows one to make rough predictions about the progress of biotechnology into the next 20 years. Although predictions mentioned here are inevitably based on incomplete information, they will hopefully serve as a useful guide to make plausible projections for the future.
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