The next big thing in science
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Such mass-scale failures happen when we, as a society, neglect our long-term goals in pursuit of short-term interests. Failures of our collective self-control do pose this threat. But such a failure of a single person's self-control does not risk our entire species. Let me explain: Failure of an individual's self-control bears direct consequences for that individual take, for example, the failure of a person to modify their diet appropriately after a heart attack. If, 100 years ago, germs posed the greatest threat to humanity, today we are most threatened by a lack of self-control. This will be necessary in addressing the most pressing challenge we face as humankind: climate change. I hope for a breakthrough in improving our collective self-control. But that’s something all of us can help address. The number of ways in which we walk blithely into Armageddon is very high. These are compounded by the deliberate erosion of facts and truth, which pose grave threats to society. The danger of nuclear annihilation is on the rise, too.
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If we act now, we might avoid some of the worst, civilization-threatening outcomes. We can impact just how bad things will get decades from now.
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The next 10 years will be critical for climate. I’m a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which sets the Doomsday Clock, so that’s something we think about a lot. Two things that worry me about the future are nuclear annihilation and climate change-both due to technological advancements. Our gravitational wave detectors haven't discovered anything profoundly unexpected, at least not yet. In astronomy, whenever we’ve invented a new way to look at the sky, we discover something new that no one had ever thought of before. The most exciting thing is always something you haven't anticipated. Or maybe something unusual will pop up in our gravitational wave detectors-we’ve picked up black hole collisions and neutron star collisions, but what if we detected waves from cosmic strings? Those happen about once every hundred years, so it could be anytime. Like if a supernova went off in our own galaxy-with all the ways we have to detect astronomical events now, that would be an incredible way to learn about everything from the physics of stars to the history of the universe. Then there’s a few roll-of-the-dice things that could happen that would be amazing. Our gravitational wave detectors are getting more and more sensitive, so we’ll learn a ton about the universe as we get more data. So there are ethical questions to deal with-like when and how is appropriate to engineer humans?-as well as regulatory questions-like how can truly individualized genetic medicines be tested and approved?Įngaging the public in open dialogue-and ensuring that there is broad understanding and buy-in-is absolutely critical to fully capitalizing on the awesome potential of synthetic biology to address important problems in the next decade. The "GMO" fear is an especially worrying example of the backlash that can emerge if some bad commercial players drive a technology. The public has a lot of misconceptions about engineered biological systems. What’s a possible consequence of science or technology in the next decade that you worry about? I believe engineered biotechnologies are going to become a bigger part of our life-and key solutions to seemingly intractable problems dealing with food safety, human health, and pollution. This precision will allow us to better treat disease, modify the natural world around us, and create more environmentally-friendly biotechnologies. Now we are entering a new era, where one can go into a cell or organism and make permanent DNA changes. What do you think might be the most exciting result of scientific or technological advances in the next decade?ĭrug discovery since the dawn of civilization has generally involved finding chemicals from our natural world or discovering molecules in the lab, and it’s mostly to treat the symptoms of disease. So what could be next as the 2020s begin? Four eminent University of Chicago scientists consider the possibilities-and pitfalls-their own fields could see in the decade ahead. In the last 10 years, we saw discoveries scientists had only dreamed of-from the precise genetic engineering allowed by a little molecule called CRISPR to being able to detect ripples in the fabric of space-time.