10 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
ANDRZEJ KRAUZEFROM THE EDITORI
vividly recall, as a child in the 1980s, spending an inor-
dinate amount of time watching classic Hanna-Barbera
cartoons such as The Flintstones, The Yogi Bear Show,
and The Jetsons in syndication. That last show, in partic-
ular, fed what I assume is a natural fascination that most
young people have with the future. I’m sure if I looked
hard enough through the ephemera of my childhood, I
could find a few grade school notebooks festooned with
poorly drawn images of flying cars, robot servants, and
personal jetpacks. In those halcyon days of boyhood, one
date stuck in my mind as “the future”—2020. That year,
difficult to imagine but endlessly entertaining to dream
about, was when everything would be different. World
peace would be a reality. Technology would solve human-
ity’s and the planet’s ailments. And yes, cars would fly.
Alas, this “future” date has arrived, and though we
each walk around with supercomputers in our pockets or
purses, and some cars can indeed drive themselves, little
of the Jetsonian vision of the future has come to pass. But
that doesn’t mean that we’re not living a futuristic exis-
tence with regard to the leaps and bounds that science has
made, particularly in the past decade.
Since 2010, humanity has learned much about our
place in the universe. In 2016, astrophysicists provided
the first-ever direct evidence of gravitational waves in the
fabric of space and time—these caused by two massive
black holes colliding more than a billion years ago—a dis-
covery half a century in the making. Then, just last year,
astronomers published the first image of a black hole.
Mind-bending stuff.
The past decade of life science advancement and
innovation has been similarly remarkable. In the 2010s,
the FDA approved the first-ever gene therapy to hit the
market, a CAR T cell immunotherapy for cancer (which
some have called the first truly personalized medicine),
the first-ever RNAi-based therapy, and, at the very end of
the decade, the first vaccine for the deadly Ebola virus that
ravaged parts of Africa earlier in the decade. Life scien-
tists working in the 2010s also arrived at the long-awaited
$1,000 whole human genome sequence, peered further
than ever into the internal landscape of the living cell,
and helped rewrite human history with newly discovered
species and hybrids added to our ancient family tree and
with new models for prehistoric human migrations. Ontop of these watershed moments, the 2010s saw the rise
and rapid maturation of CRISPR genome editing, which
is set to change the landscape of clinical practice and bio-
medical research for decades to come.
As is often the case with science, these breakthroughs
do not represent the crossing of finish lines, but rather
serve as starting points. The 2020s and decades to come
likely hold in store discoveries and applications that will
prove even more momentous. As biologists forge ahead,
a common theme emerges: as one teases apart more and
more of life’s complexity, the chore of gathering, sorting,
storing, and analyzing data becomes tougher and tougher.
But in this arena, too, science has answered the call. Bio-
informatics has made impressive strides in recent years,
especially in enhancing researchers’ ability to handle
unwieldy datasets using artificial intelligence.
That’s not to say that the recent past, and likely the
near future, are without problems. Widespread inequal-
ity continues to plague societies around the globe. And
as the human population grows, our environment is
in desperate need of thoughtful, forward-looking, evi-
dence-based research and action. But if one consid-
ers how far we’ve come in some arenas, it starts to look
like the future has truly arrived. In the space of mere
decades, science has transformed several diseases—HIV
and some cancers, for example—from death sentences
into treatable and survivable illnesses. We may not have
consumer-grade flying cars and jetpacks yet, but 2020
is feeling pretty futuristic. gEditor-in-Chief
[email protected]Into the Future
On the crest of a new decade, science is
poised to change the world... again.BY BOB GRANT