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Printer FriendlyReprinted with permission from Horizon Air Magazine, July 2001 issue, copyright 2001. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced by any method or in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Products of Innovation
Developing the next big thing
By Eric Lucas
Karin Rodland believes she may be on to something big—a way to fight ovarian cancer that she calls "signal transduction therapeutics." Big as the idea may be, her physical target is small: some proteins that she suspects could be the key to the mysterious, confounding and awful tendency of some cells to run amok.
"What we're talking about here is incredibly complex," Rodland says. An ovarian cancer cell has about 30,000 proteins in it, and for 29,950 of those, I have no idea what they do. But the others seem to be involved in signaling the cells to start acting inappropriately, and I'm focusing on calcium-sensing receptor proteins that I think are at the heart of the problem."
An earnest and plainspoken cell biologist working at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Richland, Washington, Rodland envisions a day—in the next five to 10 years—when her research leads to pharmaceuticals that make ovarian cancer easily treatable. Optimistic, perhaps, but definitely appealing.
The arena in which Rodland works is called proteomics—the science of understanding how the thousands and thousands of proteins in human cells actually perform the functions of life. Now that most of the human genome has been mapped, molecular biologists and medical researchers are focusing on the proteins for which those genes are the blueprints.
Proteins are the currency of biological commerce. They carry out the tasks necessary for life and cause dysfunctions such as cancer. The key to what happens in the human body often seems to be the interaction between proteins, such as when the calcium receptors Rodland is investigating spur expression of other proteins that incite uncontrolled cell division.
"One protein probably doesn't tell you what you need to know," she says. "But you track down multiple proteins, develop a profile of what they do and how they interact, now you're getting useful information.
Like much of the path-breaking innovation taking place throughout the West Coast these days, Rodland's work reflects an entirely new way of thinking about the world in which we live. Call it systems theory for life, the universe and everything. No longer is it likely that one incandescent discovery will upend the way we live, such as the internal combustion engine and the semiconductor did. Instead, understanding complex relationships and interactions most likely is the key to development of the next big things—the most powerful changes—we'll see over the next 25 years. In fact, the growing use of this manifold approach to exploration, discovery and problem-solving is in itself a significant thing.
"We are in a period of great flux," observes Sesh Velamoor, the director and program manager at the Foundation for the Future in Bellevue, Washington. "Our underlying understanding of the way the universe works, and our place in it, is undergoing transformation. We inhabit a complex world of multiple variables and interactions."
As we've come to appreciate how multifaceted our world is, we've begun to develop more multifaceted approaches, combining biology and electronics, for instance. Scientists are looking at data-storage systems based on bacteria or yeast.
This past spring, Boeing announced that it will combine greater speed, longer range and higher altitude in a commercial passenger jet that flies close to the speed of sound, pruning hours off wearying long intercontinental flight. Simply drawing, engineering and producing the first such plane will cost billions—flying that fast efficiently requires a radical new design—but the return may be billions more than that. The new "sonic cruiser" could be flying as early as 2006, is expected to have a range of up to 10,350 miles and a speed of Mach .95 to Mach .98, and will cruise at 41,000 to 45,000 feet-around 5,000 feet higher than is typical today.
Air travelers on short as well as long routes will benefit tremendously from increased use of a navigation technology called Required Navigation Performance (RNP), sometimes referred to as "pinpoint navigation." RNP, which uses systems such as GPS, essentially creates a line for a plane to follow. Because the technology specifies a precise three-dimensional course, it has the potential to increase safety and to significantly reduce delays caused by cloudy, rainy or snowy days. When visibility is diminished, airports with runways close together often have to shut down all but one runway because pilots can't see each other's planes as they approach to land. RNP can guide the planes in safely through the weather until they're below the cloud cover. RNP can also guide planes accurately over areas that have less-sophisticated ground-to-air navigation systems, and it can reduce airway congestion in general, since planes will be able to land at more frequent intervals.
Alaska Airlines was the first airline in the world to equip planes with RNP—spending millions to do so—and it began using the technology on commercial flights to Alaska destinations in 1996. The airline is now leading the evaluation for RNP use in San Francisco, and other airlines are working to adopt RNP, with widespread use expected within the next decade.
Horizon Air is the only airline in the United States to use a similar technology to take off in areas where ground-based navigation systems are absent or inoperable.
For built-in entertainment in the air or on the ground, Beaverton, Oregon-based Nike has developed clothes that incorporate MP3 players, and Levi Strauss, headquartered in San Francisco, experimented last year with a jacket that had wires woven into it for an attached cell phone, MP3 player and earphones—all controlled by a remote. Palo Alto-based Lunar Design envisions a jacket that displays—on your coat front or sleeve—data such as street maps picked up from GPS signals. Bike messengers have been cited as likely customers.
Another Palo Alto company, Gyricon Media, is marrying plastic and electronic signals to create electronic paper.
The West Coast is a center for this type of innovation—and of enterprises that attempt to turn new ideas into commercial successes. See the page 21 sidebar for a look at some of the projects under way.
Admittedly, determining what truly is going to be the next big thing—scientifically or financially—is little more than a guessing game. By now, according to 1950s projections by science fiction author Robert Heinlein, we should be whizzing around in antigravity cars and relying on robotic butlers. The seemed quite believable in 1957s The Door into Summer. On the other hand, no one predicted the breadth and depth of the Internet.
"[It] was lying around in plain sight for about 25 or 30 years, and all of a sudden it took off in a dramatic manner," noted former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold in a 1999 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation. "Not only could the next [big] thing be out there, but it could actually be familiar and discounted and thought nothing of today."
Each year, almost 2,000 hopeful innovators set up shop at the Las Vegas Convention Center for the Consumer Electronics Show, a dizzying exposition at which products range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Here you'll find your neighbor's uncle, with the automatic fruit-smoothie maker he cobbled together at home, next to heavyweights such as Microsoft.
Products that received Best of Show awards this year include the following:
- Casio's Wrist Camera, a wearable digital-camera watch that stores up to 100 images, along with letters and numbers, which can all be transferred to a computer. Casio's satellite-navigation watch was also honored.
- InterAct Accessories' Shark MX for the Nintendo Game Boy, which lets you send and receive e-mail on the Game Boy, and includes a calculator, address book, calendar and time zone screens.
- Panasonic's microwave oven, which uses something called "inverter technology" to provide "maximum cooking in minimum time." The technology also keeps food from overcooking at the edges and provides "turbo defrost."
When you program conventional microwaves to cook at lower power levels, they pulse delivery of 100 percent power, Panasonic explains. Thus, a microwave set at 60 percent power cooks 60 percent of the time and remains idle 40 percent of the time. But when you use inverter technology, if you ask for 60 percent power, you get 60 percent power the whole time. This cooks your food better.
While the above items were among the show's stars, it would be foolish to dismiss anyone out-of-hand—or accept anyone's eternal hegemony. Even leading companies know how fast things change these days, and they're working to stay on top.
Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center of one leading company, Xerox, have developed "electronic paper"—a sheet of transparent plastic, no thicker than a standard transparency, that responds to signals from electric pens and to commands from a computer. It can display text and graphics, and its selling point is that copy can be deleted, as on a computer screen, and the paper can be reused. A Xerox spinoff, Palo Alto-based Gyricon Media Inc., formed last December, is perfecting the product and hopes to have it available next year. The company will initially target supermarkets and other retailers, which can use the paper for signs and displays—instantly changing the information from a central location without using a printer.
One day, electronic paper may lead to electronic books, with new text downloaded onto the same pages each time you want to read something different. At a Seybold publishing conference last year, Xerox's Seely Brown said you might even be able to touch certain parts of the paper to hear sounds, see animated images of characters in the novel or get more information about a specific item.
And like the folks at Lunar Design, some computer gurus at the conference said they expect to see the day when many types of surfaces—from clothing to table tops—host graphics and text.
Understanding complex systems that range from inter-connected devices to interconnected proteins is a step toward understanding the universe we inhabit-to the extent that we can. Velamoor is fond of an analogy by physicist Per Bak, who likens the world to a pile of sand. Each change is like adding a bit of sand to one part of the pile, thus changing that particular place on the pile. Add up a lot of these changes, and the pile is transformed.
"And this happens without anyone ever designing it or intending it," says Velamoor. Global warming is a good example.
According to futurist Ray Kurzweil, an MIT graduate who has created cutting-edge technologies such as talking reading machines for the blind and voice-powered software, the rate at which the sand is shifting is accelerating. At some point—perhaps in 40 to 50 years, he says—change will be so rapid, we can't at this point begin to comprehend what things will be like then. Furthermore, the pace of change will become so fast around the mid-21st century, we'll completely lose our ability to predict future trends.
In an online preview of his book The Singularity Is Near, to be published next year, Kurzweil says we're doubling the rate of progress every decade, and we will see a century's worth of progress, at today's rate, in only 25 calendar years. During the 21st century, he says, we will witness on the order of 20,000 years of progress.
Accelerating technology will lead to superhuman machine intelligence that will soon exceed human intelligence, probably by the year 2030, he says. "Already IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer, scheduled to be completed by 2005, is projected to provide 1 million billion calculations per second. This is already one-twentieth of the capacity of the human brain. …Supercomputers will achieve one-human-brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by around 2020. By 2030, it will take a village of human brains (around a thousand) to match $1,000 of computing. By 2050, $1,000 of computing will equal the processing power of all human brains on earth."
At least, the brains that are still using carbon-based neurons, Kurzweil says. He believes humans will "port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate." An introduction to his Website, www.KurzweilAI.Net, states that the site "focuses on the exponential growth of intelligence, both biological and machine, and the merger of the two in a post-humanist future." Hold onto your hats.
Of course, not every big thing stretches a scientific or industrial boundary. One innovation that's already popular is a product made in Seattle that simply stretches a special type of foam. Cascade Designs' Therm-a-Rest roll-out camping-mattress line, launched in 1973, is made with self-inflating foam cells that create a warm, comfortable surface on which to lay one's weary body and head. Over the past 25 years, the line has become one of the world's biggest outdoor gear successes.
This past spring—responding to requests from older, wider backpackers—Cascade Designs introduced an even thicker, wider version-the LE MegaRest, 30 inches wide, 80 inches long and 3 inches deep-that will keep the pointiest rock from the biggest, boniest hip.
"Yes, it's big. Yeah, at 180 clams, retail, it's expensive," wrote Seattle Times outdoors writer Ron Judd when he reviewed the product at an industry trade show. "[But] upgrading to a MegaRest isn't the height of self-indulgent luxury. It's a defensive measure against hostile geological forces. …I'll never sleep on anything else again. …"
Now that's obviously the next big thing.
And to make extreme but not untenable extrapolations based on current research, the day may come that a future MegaRest is made by engineering a biological system that simply self-organizes a soft, supple, sensational camping mattress.
Too unbelievable? Keep in mind that plastics are just highly refined organic compounds derived from petroleum or cellulose. Who knows what products and uses might result from new ways of engineering other organic compounds.
Whatever the future holds, I know I'll appreciate the MegaRest and its descendants. It's important to get a good night's sleep, and that won't change.
Eric Lucas has relied on the previously biggest Therm-a-Rest for years. He didn't know he required a bigger, thicker, longer one. Until now.
Potential Big Things
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