VISIONS: How Science Will Revolutionize
the 21st Century
By Michio Kaku Anchor, 403 pages, $24.95
The future is a fiction, which makes it fun to talk about. Michio Kaku’s “Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century” provides one invaluable guidebook to the future that science offers us. “Visions,” written in the prophetic tradition of books such as Alvin Toffler’s “Fu-ture Shock,” tells us less about the future than it does about the concerns of the present. Still, Kaku, a physi-cist at the City College of New York and author of the popular 1994 book “Hyper-space,” offers an erudite, compelling, insider’s look into the most mind-bending potential of science research.
Science is on the verge of a revolution, Kaku reports, one that will link in a synergistic rush the three scientific pillars of compu-ters, biotechnology and quantum physics. In the next 50 years we will move funda-mentally from the age of discovery (the last three centuries) to one of mastery, from being “passive observ-ers of Nature to being active choreographers of Nature.” We will have gene therapies for diseases like cancer and AIDS; thinking machines that learn like humans and inhabit our home appliances, our clothes and our bodies; and new energy and transportation sources that will remake our planet and civilization.
To reach this brave new world, Kaku writes, re-searchers are linking for-merly separate disciplines in creative new ways. Biology is no longer a life science, for instance, but an information science. Computer science, for its part, is trying to mimic the incredible adaptability of live organisms. Quantum physics sounds like alchemy in its promise of new energy and power sources. Kaku tells us that scientists are hoping to unite these disparate fields in a world of “ubiquitous” human-technology in-teractions.
We are already making great ad-vances, and Kaku draws on hard science to support his claims. Today new drugs, food crops, even computer chips, have been developed by mi-micking the natural processes of DNA. Molecular computers attempt to draw from quantum mechanics. Kaku re-ports on current physics and astro-nomy advances that could one day make interplanetary travel feasible. He lucidly gives his futurology a history and context, extrapolating from the current burst of progress (five years ago seems like ancient history) to bolster his argument for an imminent revolution.
In biotechnology, for instance, advances today are rewriting basic theories faster than peer review can keep up with them. We will soon know the code for all of the 60,000 to 80,000 genes in human DNA, whereas only three years ago a similar feat with the much simpler flu bacterium was deemed impossible. We pretty much know everything there is to know about the genetics of cancer, and Kaku suggests a cure is just on the horizon.
Extrapolations like this will vex the careful reader, and many of Kaku’s predictions for the years 2020 or 2050 sound suspiciously exaggerated, if not silly. He also evades the question of what technology, exactly, we really want. “A simple necktie will have more computing power than today’s super computer,” he writes. Really? A job applicant’s resume, Kaku suggests, could be transmitted to you electronically through the sweat of her or his handshake. Anyone who has had to read badly written resumes will cry out, “Please, no!”
Most readers, of course, will separate the fact from fancy in this intentionally fun and readable book. One of its most vital and fascinating arguments is that the most important cur-rent research is not known to the larger public because the pace of advancement is accelerating so quickly that the fundamental rules for what is possible keep changing. A year ago most experts said cloning was unattainable. Today, private companies are leaping ahead of their academic peers in biotechnology and information technology, snatching up patents on technologies for manipulating genetic processes faster than we can understand them. The current war for control of cyberspace is much in the news, yet few know the in-sider tricks and rivalries of its day-to-day practice.
Just as the turn of the last century saw a monumental shift in economic power based on the machine-tool technologies of oil and elec-tricity, we now face a similar shift based on computer science and biotechnology. Kaku pays some attention to the ethical and moral dilem-mas in this transformation in the underpinnings of new wealth, but he dismisses them too quickly. If we can soon grow new organs for our aging bodies, for in-stance, should immortality be available only to those who can afford it?
In his reporting, Kaku talked to 150 scientists over 10 years, many of them Nobel laureates or up-and-coming good talkers. Like many “visionaries” whose best works lie in the past, or perhaps far in the future, these sources sound uniformly upbeat and vague. Kaku did not seek many of today’s newer, leading-edge researchers doing quiet, day-to-day, difficult research the old-fashioned, peer-reviewed way. One wishes he would have used his insider knowledge to cast a more discerning look at his fellow practitioners and their claims. In these pages all scien-tists are funded, few have rivalries and no one seems to consider too deeply what technology the world really needs.
This important book is well worth reading. Taking the big view, though, “Visions” conveys a contagious sense of the wonder of science but misses its current struggles and, consequently, much of the future’s best fun.
