Forcast: Medicine/beotechnology;Forecast: Computer power;Forecast: Computers;

              medicine/
BfotecnnoiocjLi
There is today an explosive growth in high-technology
application. For example,
advances in medicine, based in part on
technologies borrowed from the physical
sciences, are rapidly generating new
commercial apparatus and techniques useful
in diagnosis and treatment, including nuclear
magnetic resonance, scanning electronic
microscopes, a variety of lasers, and new
sources of synchrotron radiation. • Already
we see emerging the commercialization of
biotechnology as a result of basic research
work done during the past ten years. Poten­tial
applications appear to be most imminent
in pharmaceuticals and agriculture. In the
pharmaceutical industry, it will proceed most
rapidly in such product areas as human
insulin, antibiotics, vaccines, and protein
compounds, with full-scale application in
perhaps ten years. The initial application of
biotechnology in agriculture will likely occur
in the areas of animal disease treatment. The
production of chemicals, environmental
applications, and bioelectronics holds great
promise over a longer timeframe.
DR. FRANK PRESS
President
National Academy of Sciences
computers
The development of computers and their applications will continue to be very
rapid during the coming decade. Microelectronic circuit costs will continue to
fall rapidly, making very powerful microcomputers available for under $100
each. Enormous parallel computers comprised of thousands of cooperating
microcomputers will also be built and will attain computation rates of tens of
billions of instructions per second. Though our understanding of what will
ultimately be involved is still limited, these giant machines will spur progress
toward artificial intelligence—that is, the realization of systems able to dupli­cate
such central human functions as the understanding of spoken language,
the visual location of objects in complex scenes, and the ability to deal in
sophisticated ways with natural language text of the sort that appears in
magazines and newspapers.
JACOB T. SCHWARTZ
Director, Computer Science Division
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
New York Universtiy
By 1990, the drive for
computer power within the
academic-scientific commu­nity,
in association with the
national laboratories, will
have succeeded in achieving
a completely new type of
supercomputer architecture.
These special-purpose
devices will represent
increases in computer power
by factors of 100 to 10,000
over what one might expect
from mainframe manufac­ture.
Applications of these
developments to other fields
are certain to repeat the
strong impact of this kind of
research on the scientific
industry that occurred in the
early sixties.
LEON M. LEDERMAN
Director
Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory