What issues concern us the most at the global level? New Scientist asked this question to the global Inter-Academy Panel. The response included climate, food, biodiversity, water, population, energy, pollution, education, nuclear, pandemics, ageing, poverty, and terrorism.

Transport yourself to 2020. What do you see in the leap year starting on an auspicious Wednesday?

Bryan Appleyard’s ‘future shocks’ of the next ten years in The Sunday Times include super computer models of our brains; brain simulation will tell us why we are unhappy. It will give us personalised prescriptions for marriage, lifestyle and healthcare, and also what we need to do to stop headaches. In another ten years a woman can choose a time for child bearing as per her convenience. It doesn’t matter if she is ‘late’ for child bearing; a young woman can preserve her eggs so that these can be used as and when she is ready for child bearing. May be artificial trees will be available to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The science magazine Nature asked leading experts on science and technology where their fields will be ten years from now. Their response was quite fascinating. It is likely that due to advanced brain-computer interface, spoken queries will be accepted; super-smart computers could even be responding to unspoken thoughts. Since computers will be able to read minds, there will be questions on privacy and ethics. “Users will decide how much of their lives they want to share with search engines, and in what ways”, said Peter Norvig, director of research at Google.

The cost of genome sequencing will come down drastically. This will result in sequencing of entire genomes of millions of people, thus spearheading the era of personalised medicine. Another big theme will be the analysis of the human microbiome, the microbial communities that live inside our gut and other organs. Gut microbes will be the priority of researchers in the coming years. A Relman of Veterans Affairs Health Care System at Palo Alto, California, said, “By 2020, personalised health care could involve doctors monitoring the metabolic activities of a patient’s gut microbes and, possibly, modulating them therapeutically.” Biologists will have access to tools that will allow them to arrange atoms to optimise catalysts for making chemicals, says George Church of Harvard Medical School. Programmable personal stem cells would possibly be able to sense a nearby tumour, coordinate an attack and drill into the cancer cells to release toxins.

The diagnosis and treatment of mental health problems will be based on the underlying biology, rather than on an interpretation of symptoms. “There is no straight road to psychiatric illness, but a highly diverse network of developmental pathways”, says Daniel R Weinberger of US National Institute of Mental Health. A more realistic endeavour for the next ten years will be to look for genes that raise our vulnerability to brain defects due to our responses to the environment.

Several experts said that climate change could force dramatic shifts in the world’s energy economy. Global levy on carbon emissions could improve things. By 2020 the energy sector will be dominated by “low-carbon society” that will call for greater emphasis on the development of cheap and efficient clean energy technologies.

In 10 years from now, science and technology promises to create a new world order. In this new world being a spectator will not be enough. It is time to become a player. zz

The writer is a biotechnologist and ED, Birla Institute of Scientific Research, Jaipur