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From sci-fi to reality?

Close your eyes and imagine the following scenario. Human beings with identity chip implants in each palm, wearing `braincaps' which enable them to receive huge amounts of knowledge and communicate through telepathy. Genetically-engineered gorillas helpi ng humans carry out labour-intensive work in a `space colony' 36,000 km up in the stratosphere.

Sounds like science fiction, doesn't it? Yes, it is straight out of an Arthur C. Clarke thriller titled 3001: The Final Odyssey. In his characteristic style, the master sci-fi writer pans far ahead in time to visualise the world in the third millennium.

Science fiction writers of the genre of Clarke, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Eric Von Danicken and Issac Asimov have demonstrated a rare gift of clairvoyance. This power of intuition has been expressed in the form of fiction, laced with a racy, narrative sty le while dealing with outer space, galaxies, extra-terrestrial life and make-believe.

For instance, Jules Verne in his 1869 masterpiece produced graphic descriptions of man's trip to the moon and the spacecraft used. What was vivid fiction in 1869 became reality exactly a century later when Neil Armstrong became the first human being to m ake that giant leap for mankind through a small step on the moon's surface in 1969.

Contrast this with events of 400 years ago. Roger Bacon's hypothetical proposal in 1267 bore fruit in 1608 in the first operational microscope built by the Dutch spectacle-maker, Zacharias Jansen. While Jansen's invention opened up the micro-cosmos, Gali leo Galilee's telescope extended the vision of the human eye far into the depths of the skies. Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton and Tycho Brahe, in the span of a century, shattered many myths including the `earth-centric' view of the universe.

The roller-coaster ride of breakthroughs with several peaks during the 16th and 17th centuries in astronomy and astrophysics, lent fresh grist to science fiction writers for speculation about future possibilities in the unfathomable cosmos. But in real l ife too, scientists are making rapid strides in this direction. The Hubble's telescope, floating around in outer space, the trio of orbiting X-ray telescopes, NASA's `Chandra' telescope and the Mars lander sent by scientific groups, promise to throw ligh t on questions such as the forecasts on black holes, supernovas and life on other planets.

During the late 19th and early 20th century, two streams of sci-fi writers and hardcore experimental scientists virtually vied with each other -- one to visualise the distant future and the other to invent and discover new frontiers of knowledge. This wa s the period when J.J. Thompson discovered the electron, William Roentgen the X-ray, Albert Einstein came up with his special theory of relativity, Rutherford his atom model and Thomas Alva Edison with his nearly 1,000 patented discoveries and inventions .

The writer-scientist race has especially been intense in the fields of physics, computers and biology where fiction is telescoping into fact at virtually breakneck speed.

Designer animals, drugs that precisely target disease sites and provide cures, tailor-made `greenhouse' gases which can avert the looming climate crisis, chemical noses that sniff thousands of different gases, nanocomputers which shrink computer chips to molecular dimensions, all powered by `miniaturised' gadgets and fast-crunching computers are already in the realm of the achievable.

The cloning of Dolly the sheep, the complete decoding of chromosome 22 under the Human Genome Project, preliminary results from MIT scientists demonstrating that computers can `mimic' primitive emotions and a whole range of developments over the last two decades have catapulted man onto the threshold of a tantalisingly `brave new world', Aldous Huxley-style, in the 21st century.

The transition to the new millennium has, however, not been so easy. The enhanced threat of the nuclear holocaust, the possibility of a disastrous `third world war' and the nerve-racking Y2K dilemma have kept people on tenterhooks. But the power of the c omputer and the explosive pace of developments in the life sciences arena through the use of genetic engineering are indicators are that we are rapidly closing in on this `brave new world' with its babies engineered to be super-intelligent alphas, betas and gammas.

Computers are threatening to become the key scientific experimentalists in this millennium. The era of direct computer-human interface is already evolving; which means that conferencing via the Internet and human interaction, replete with smiles and emot ions, is foreseeable, says Dr. Charles R. Cantor of Sequenom, an industrial genomics company based in the US and Germany.

In fact, venturing into what he termed the usually uncharted territory of prediction by scientists, Dr. Cantor said we are quite close to breakthroughs that make it possible to grow plants endowed with the ability to walk and equip micro-organisms to per form photosynthesis more efficiently than they can on their own. Novel organisms would be produced through evolutionary molecular genetics which is growing in leaps and bounds.

Bio-informatics will emerge as the key field riding the crest of fast computers in the coming decades. Enormous quantities of biological data, stored and analysed by computers of Petaflop speeds and backed by techniques using DNA chips and mass spectrome try, 3-D molecular genetics, etc, should unlock several secrets in our life.

For the common man, the first radically visible benefit to accrue would be the identify chip, a different integrated circuit (IC) perhaps, which will carry unique genetic data about individuals in coded form. A doctor will be able to decipher the data an d administer the required treatment.

Interestingly, a 1997 sci-fi film, Gattaca, spun a tale around DNA. Individuals were selected for education and jobs on the basis of their genetic make-up or DNA. Their chief identity was a DNA chip giving their basic blueprint.

The availability of the complete genetic map of the human genome, consisting of 1,00,000 genes is expected to turn some aspects of medical science on their head. Genetic manipulations, highly personalised medicine and new time-release and target drugs ar e all set to conquer diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Down's Syndrome, diabetes and many other genetically linked illnesses.

Multinationals such as IBM, DuPont, Monsanto, Novartis, ICI, Sandoz and a range of specialised new corporates such as Celera, Human Genomics and Sequenom Inc. have specialised capabilities to derive full advantage of the fallout of the human genome proje ct. Celera, for instance, is already building the world's largest supercomputer for biology research, a 1,200-processor machine. The idea is to understand thousands of proteins in a dynamically changing body environment. At present, biology investigates a single protein at a time.

By 2010, a click on your personal computer will be enough to instantly marshall all the computer power needed from what will be the world's largest supercomputer, the Internet. Today's fast-crunching, powerful machines will be routinely available to the masses. This soon-to-be scenario, inferred by `Nature' magazine derives partly from a June 1999 development. A new super-computing record was announced by a team led by Ed Seidel of the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam and Wai-mo Suen of Washington U niversity, St. Louis when they demonstrated a 140,000-CPU-hour run which produced almost a terabyte of data, using the 256 processor `Origin 2000' at the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

In 1965, the co-founder of Intel Corporation, Gordon Moore, had predicted that the processing speed of computer chips would double every 18 months. What has now become famous as `Moore's Law' has had a profound impact on technological developments during the last three decades. By closely packing more and more minute transistor devices into available space through miniaturisation, scientists have exponentially raised crunching speeds.

No wonder, therefore, that the highly powerful teraflop (10 to power 12 floating point operations per second) will soon give way to petaflop supercomputers which are 1,000 times faster. This again, is expected as early as 2010.

These powerful machines will usher in radical changes in the way we communicate with each other and the way we work, especially in the corporate sector and the field of education. And for a scientist, these awesome machines would mean access to an avalan che of data which can be used to crack otherwise time-consuming problems.

The telephone, video and virtual reality are likely to become commonplace on the Internet. This in turn would be preceded by third-generation technologies driven by companies such as Ericsson et al which promise to bring convergence in telephone, compute r and media (television). This means that a single wire will allow simultaneous viewing of a soap opera, business conversations on a mobile phone as well as surfing of the Net by three different persons in a family. These digital cables are expected to l ink up other gadgets at home such as a refrigerator, microwave, washing machine, etc, to transform a traditional dwelling into a `digital home'.

The next enabling technology will be the versatile `smart cards' embedded with computer chips. In the labs of Gemplus Technologies in Singapore, there is a prototype multimedia watch with a tiny chip backed up by intelligence which is a candidate for a p ersonal identity `smart card' that you can wear. It is activated by human warmth and can carry your medical history, facilitate remote control gadgets at home and help access the Internet. It could well be your passport to the wired, technology-intensive world of tomorrow.

In the field of science and technology, it has been said that the achievements of the early part of the 20th century were equivalent to the progress of the last 2,000 years. But the pace of developments in the fields of electronics, computers and biology in the last few decades of the 20th century have been astounding. With the time lag between `mind to matter' becoming extremely short, the 21st century promises to be extremely exciting, to say the least.