In a recent issue, Scientific journal Nature ran a story about how different scientific disciplines will evolve over next ten years (for interested readers article is freely available here). Nature asked a selected groups of leading researchers and science policy makers to forecast scientific endeavour in a range of fields such as synthetic biology, the microbiome, metabolomics, personalised medicine, drug discovery etc. For me most of predictions were interesting although many of them sounded like science fiction but thats what these predictions are all about.

Google Search
On the future of search technologies Peter Norvig idea to connect the next decade search engine with brains signals is a fascinating proposition. In his own desctiption

The majority of search queries will be spoken, not typed, and an experimental minority will be through direct monitoring of brain signals. Users will decide how much of their lives they want to share with search engines, and in what ways.

Imagine what can be done with such a technology (well I will expect a brain Dropbox utility where I can synchronize the latest news in my brain directly from Google search engine). People will neither bother to type nor remember, eventually everyone will be living in a web-matrix designed by Google.

Synthetic biology
Second in our list is the synthetic biology. George Church point outs the myriad technologies such as nano-tech in combination with synthetic biology will be offering unseen endeavors such as

nano-memory devices that harness the ability of certain bacteria to navigate Earth’s weak magnetic field using magnetite nanoparticles.

In my opinion in coming ten years synthetic biology will be mostly doing what it is supposed to do – production of chemicals, bioremediation, synthetic biofuels and food.

Drug discovery, Informatics and Personalized medicine
On the future of the drug discovery Gary P. Pisano suggest that “no one should be surprised to see the emergence of a major Chinese multinational drug company”. Fair enough, globalization of drug innovation will be major theme in coming decade. As matter of fact in recent years China has emerged as one of the fastest-growing pharmaceutical markets in the world, increasing by 39 percent to $24.5 billion in year 2008. Pharmaceutical giant like Pfizer are seeking partnerships with Chinese drugmakers.
One other growing area of pharmaceutical interest will be personalized medicine more especially the development of tailored therapeutic drugs based on genetic differences and identification of high-impact risk factors behind many diseases. What really needed is the informatics innovation to translate the data deluge into actionable results that can impact drug discovery process – a factor which is slightly ignored in the article. According to Eric Schadt of Sage Bionetworks, advances of the last decade will demand an informatics revolution in the coming years and “real challenge in the next decade will be informatics based”

Only by marrying information technology to the life sciences and biotechnology will we realize the astonishing potential of the vast amounts of biological data we will be capable of generating. Such data, if properly integrated and analyzed, will enable personalized medicine strategies that lead to every one of us making better choices on how we not only treat disease, but prevent it altogether.

A similar kind of view was presented by David Walt

Data processing and bioinformatics will become the bottleneck as the need grows to assemble and compare large numbers of genomes. Moore’s Law just can’t keep up.

Decline in funding and rise of multidisciplinarity
Other major concern which was raised by several experts from varying scientific domains is the sustainability. R&D funding for most of scientific domain is facing a sudden decline. For instance in year 2009 total funding for the European Bioinformatics Institute dipped about 10 percent. Similarly in

United States, for example, budget deficits have caused many states to reduce their funding for public universities, and at the federal level, there is likely to be no growth or a cut in funding for research programmes.

Scientific community is under tremendous presssure from the funding bodies and to avoid a decline of funding levels community is looking towards a more collaborative, multidisciplinary approach. Research themes with broader perspective may have higher priority over narrow scope. Further the significant decline in funding may be affecting more to countries with great preeminence in scientific research. Developed countries such China are vigorously pushing forward science and technology innovation through increased funding even during hard times of recession.

Developing world
One of the suggestions that the developing world will be more benefited with scientific development in this period is quite genuine and remarkable. For instance countries like China are thinking to bypass 3G communication technologies altogether, and move straight to LTE or 4G. In same way

As costs drop, such technology will allow developing nations to leapfrog fertilizer-wasting, fossil-fuel-intensive and disease-rife farming for cleaner, more efficient systems, just as they are leapfrogging costly landlines in favour of mobile-phone networks.