Credit: Emrah Elmasli

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Virtuosity

YOU ARE sitting in your New York hotel room on a business trip, pining for your family. You could phone but conversations can often be stilted on satellite lines. Not in 2020. Technology then should provide you with a solution – and a new way to bond with your children: By playing computer games and sharing virtual entertainments with them, even if they are still at home in Brisbane.

It sounds strange. Nevertheless, computer experts say in little over a decade, electronic pastimes will not only provide us with rich, textured, multicoloured images, they will allow us to play games with any number of people no matter where you – or they – are. "You could join in a team with your children and hunt aliens, or shoot down enemy aircraft, even though you are thousands of miles apart," says David Perry, head of the California-based company Game Consultants. "It will be the ultimate bonding experience."

Nor will you be restricted to sitting before TV-based consoles. Future game sets are going to be light, fast and portable. "You will be able to play games on handheld devices that can connect with you with players across the globe – even when you are standing in a queue in Disneyland," adds Perry.

Peter Molyneux, a game designer for Microsoft Corp, is equally enthusiastic. We will no longer buy games in stores but download only when we need them, he predicts. As for their quality, that promises to be breathtaking. "Fifteen years ago, we were playing Donkey Kong and Space Invaders. Now games are approaching the quality of movies. By 2020, playing them will feel as authentic as playing a sport or living life in the real world."

Bye bye, cancer

BY 2020, several key research areas should be having considerable impact in the battle against disease, cancer in particular. "Cancer will not be cured in one massive battle," cautions Robert Weinberg, the distinguished researcher who discovered the first human oncogene (a gene that causes normal cells to turn into tumours). "Nevertheless, during the next decade and a half, there will be many individual skirmishes that will result in death rates from most common cancers being pushed down progressively."

For Weinberg, based at the Whitehead Institute within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of Boston, one of the main breakthroughs will involve discoveries of how to use drugs – currently administered on their own – in more effective combinations. In addition, the Human Genome Project, which has provided researchers with a complete inventory of all human genes, will make it increasingly easy to design drugs that attack very specific tumours. "My guess is that about 25 per cent of cancers that currently are fatal will be treated successfully, either cured or reduced to chronic but tolerable conditions," he says.

Such optimism is shared by Ian Frazer, a cancer expert at the University of Queensland who famously developed a vaccine for human papillomavirus (Cosmos, Issue 5, p10). His concern is primarily focussed on prevention. "A quarter of all cancers are caused by chronic infections," he points out. For example, the Helicobacter bacterium is linked to gastric cancer; the Hepatitis C virus to liver cancer; the Epstein-Barr virus to various lymphomas; and the HTLV-1 virus to leukaemia. "Vaccines against all these infections are likely to be developed by 2020," Frazer says.

In addition, scientists stress that lifestyle changes could also have striking effects on general health by 2020. "If there were serious reductions in cigarette smoking, then overall cancer deaths would decline by 30 to 35 per cent; while serious changes in diet, moving from meat to vegetarian diets, would produce another 10 to 15 per cent," adds Weinberg. And given the plunge in cigarette consumption now occurring among men in the West, there is hope that lifestyle-related cancers will continue to slump over the next two decades.

And then there is stem cell science, the revolutionary technology that could be used to create neurons, heart muscle and pancreatic tissue for patients, using cells taken from their own skin. Using cloning technology, an embryo would be created from an individual skin cell. Then stem cells would be extracted from that embryo. In turn these would be used to create cell lines, such as heart or pancreas cells that could be put back into patients as lifesaving transplants that would not trigger immune rejections.

It is a breathtaking prospect. However, the reputation of stem cell research was badly undermined last year by the revelation that pioneer scientist Hwang Woo-suk, of South Korea, had faked much of his research (Cosmos, Issue 8, p64). Experts remain confident, however, and argue that stem cell treatments should be well established by 2020. "We will be able to use stem cells not only for transplants but also to create banks of human tissue, both healthy and diseased, in order to test potential new drugs on them," says Huseyin Mehmet of Imperial College London. "It will bring unprecedented accuracy and cost-effectiveness to drug development."

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