Professor Peter A. Lawrence, Division of Cell Biology, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
“We will have fairly clear mechanistic understanding of normal human biochemistry, and disordered function in many diseases. Some truly novel, reasonably effective treatments will emerge,including some for currently completely untreatable inherited conditions. Most common diseases will still be around because they have strongly environmental causation, whose control requires control of human greed and irrationality - unlikely in only half a century.” Professor Martin Bobrow, Head of the Department of Medical Genetics, Cambridge Institute for Medical Research.
Where will science take us in the next 50 years?
“Science today seems so exciting, and the vistas ahead of us so vast, that the possibility that knowledge might be finite, and that one day the scientific endeavour as we know it will be over, appears ridiculous. But there's a real possibility that in 50 years we will have mined out most of the productive seams.What are those seams likely to be? ‘The brain’ is one obvious answer we still have to understand the big questions like consciousness, perception and the neural basis of intelligence and of the genetic and cultural determinants of it. This seems to me one of the major unsolved questions in science.”
"The last one hundred and fifty years of science and technology have been a remarkable story of unimaginable successes, of great benefits to the lives of selected elites, a mixed blessing for the majority of the human race (who, it should be said, would probably not exist without these achievements) and a disaster for the planet and the other biological species inhabiting it.Without a significant change of direction, or unforeseen discoveries, the best bet must be that science will continue to make more such advances, which will bring to a definitive close the history of the human race."
Professor Peter A. McNaughton, Head of the Department of Pharmacology.
Professor John Forrester, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
All photos by Katherine Borthwick
“As did Francis Crick, I hope science will take us away from religion, and from other crazed ideas.We need to care for our world and (almost) every living being on it and the only way is the road of reason.”
“Boundaries between current well defined scientific disciplines will get increasingly blurred, with key advances being made in interdisciplinary research. A good example of this is at the ever-growing interface between physics and the life sciences, with exciting developments expected in bionanotechnology for example, as we learn to understand and control the ability of nature to self assemble.”
“Philosophers are not into prediction – and I have no more prospect of getting it right than the next woman – let alone of predicting scientific developments accurately! I can see no more than a range from the disastrous (run away global warming) to 'things stabilising' (a mix of greater energy efficiency and population stabilisation, with non-carbon energy technologies).”
Professor Athene Donald, FRS, Professor of Experimental Physics, working in Soft Condensed Matter.
Baroness Professor Onora O’Neill, Principal of Newnham College, lectures in Philosophy and History & Philosophy of Science.
www.bluesci.org
History
Just over 50 years ago, when Watson and Crick determined the structure of DNA, it would have been hard to imagine the countless number of scientific advances to which their revelation has contributed. Nearing the end of 2004, we even have the ability to clone human embryos! So what is left for the scientific community to discover: where will science take us in the next 50 years? Some eminent Cambridge academics and researchers share their view with us.
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