What Are the Next Big Things?

Anybody remember researching data on microfiche? That was better than the logbooks. Just when you got adept with the microfiche machine, there was the dump desk-top machine. The manager had to force you to use the new machine by removing the microfiche machine from your vicinity. When the dump desk-top became more intelligent with the plug-and-play operating systems like Microsoft,—thanks to the mighty Bill Gates—the world arrived at the information gathering, storage and retrieval nirvana.

At about the same time in the early nineties the buzz about the Internet was coming out of the top academia, the military and government into the public arena. Now, from a small remote village, an old lady can send an e-mail to a son across the seas and, in an instant, receive a reply. One doesn’t need to understand the underlying technologies of digitization and fiber optics to do Internet.

As in that Talking Heads lyric, we might ask ourselves: How did we get here? That’s not my beautiful I-Phone; that is not my beautiful hand-thingy; and that’s not my beautiful all-in-one communication gizmo! It warms the heart that, despite the ills we hear around us, the extent of knowledge and progress seems limitless.

And now, what are the buzzes coming from academia and other research centers? There are, of course, hundreds if not thousands, but what are happening in neuroscience and molecular biology, using more powerful machines and research methods, are revolutionizing the understanding of the human condition, with the potential for our taking control of individual and community well-being.


Increasingly the researches are showing us that the brain is where all our glory and misery emanates from. Brain plasticity is a proven reality. A brain can adopt and build new connections—even until one croaks in the nineties—as long as you keep it vibrant and active.

Superiority based merely on genes using Darwinian natural selections has been debunked by the study of Epigenetics. A gene interacts in a substantial way with the environment in order to express or suppress itself. It is not Genes + Environment (G+E), but Genes ^ Environment (G^E). This single finding has enormous implications.

One can do a number of things to affect one’s happiness, physical or emotional states by activating or suppressing some of the thirty thousand genes (without changing the configuration of a gene’s DNA codes) in our genome. Moreover, the new states can then be passed on to the offspring. Imagine! The flipside, of course, is that we can pass on negative traits that we mire ourselves in. By this new biology we have the ability to change ourselves and society. It is change we can trust—and we don’t even have to be a hotshot President Obama!

So, in the spirit of The Graduate movie, where the future was in plastics, the now future is in Neuroscience and New Biology.