Before the 1990s, the total amount of collected information tended to double every four or five years. By 1999, electronic data was quadrupling every semester. Consequently, we have become accustomed to thinking of the information revolution primarily in terms of the explosion in information. From the vantage point of the year 2001, however, the information revolution is best seen more broadly as a knowledge revolution, wherein new ways of marshaling and utilizing knowledge debut each month.

The potential impact of this technology is perhaps best understood by reviewing what has already been wrought by the information revolution.

It is news to no one that the rate of technical change in communications has been accelerating in the past half century. Thirty-eight years were required for radio to reach 50 million users. Television required only 16 years to reach this plateau, personal computers only 13. But the World Wide Web reached 50 million users in four years, and the wireless Internet needed just one year.¹ And by midyear of 2001, more than half of U.S. households had a personal computer. The economic effects have been striking.

Until just a few decades ago, the economies of nearly all nations were very heavily dependent on human brawn and nature’s resources in producing corporeal products: steel, lumber, cotton, grain, and so forth. A flowering of scientific insights into the laws of nature has allowed ideas increasingly to substitute for brawn and material bulk. As a result, a very large share of world commerce is now dominated by virtually weightless conceptual products: information, services, computational capacities, and the like.

Consider that the real Gross National Product of the United States in 1999 was more than 20 times the real GNP of 1900, but as Alan Greenspan is wont to say: If we could weigh today’s GNP and also the GNP of 1900, we would likely find that the physical weight of today’s GNP is only modestly higher than it was a hundred years ago. Technological advances account for almost all this phenomenon.

Computing has indeed come a long way from 1945, when rudimentary computers were used in B-29 bombers to control gun turrets. Progress after that has been exponential, from megaflops to teraflops. A megaflop is one million floating point operations per second. By the year 2000, a tabletop PC costing U.S. $2,000 could match the performance of a 100 megaflop computer of the 1970s that was as big as a house and priced at more than U.S. $25 million. Where one teraflop of capacity (one trillion floating point operations per second) was once unimaginable, a 30 teraflop computer is scheduled to be operational by 2003, while 100 teraflop machines are on the drawing boards.

Super-high-performance computers are but one facet of the information revolution. Recent advances in networking technologies promise to alter forever the way we utilize computing. Researchers at Rice are helping to fashion a vast Grid that ultimately will link an array of distributed computing capabilities, enabling us to use the global information system as a computational as well as an information resource.

Computational grids could do for the information revolution what the electric power grid did for electricity early in the 20th century. The transformation of economies then was due not so much to the development of electricity as such, but rather to innovations in transmission and distribution of energy made cheap and accessible by the power grid.²

The Grid will interweave countless computers, databases, instruments, and people into a pervasive, seamless network of readily available, inexpensive distributed intelligence and computing power that can be deployed as an ever-ready resource for solving heretofore intractable problems. Successful deployment of the Grid could yield greatly improved methods of analysis of such topics as global climate change, environmental remediation, or the highly complex proteins that are the subject of proteomics.

In sum, the prospect of amassing the processing power of ultrahigh-performance computing at one’s fingertips is now within reach. What will this mean? Recall that the personal computer began to come into its own only in the 1980s, when it became possible to acquire a machine with a megabyte of memory (one million bytes) for a couple of thousand dollars. What might be the economic and social impact of desktops costing much less than a thousand dollars but able to access the power of computers capable of trillions of operations per second? That brave new world could yield an incredibly wide range of applications in science, including continuous real-time monitoring of conditions in all the world’s oceans, using remote sensors hooked wirelessly to digital libraries.

In my student days, biology mostly involved the passive study of life. But now biology has been transformed into a field allowing the active alteration of life. Virtually all the molecular rungs on the chemical ladders of the human genome have been identified, providing us with an almost complete parts list for a human.

Advances in nanoscale science are increasingly contributing to innovations in biomedicine and biotechnology. Biotechnology was one of the defining technologies of the 20th century, even absent the end-of-century development of rudimentary stem-cell technology. Research by economist and Nobel laureate Robert Fogel shows vividly the great extent to which investments in biomedical research even before 1925 are still paying off today. But past benefits from biomedical research may pale in comparison to what is to come.

Consider genetics, a field that a 1950s scientist would not recognize today. Gene therapy is but one of the truly luminous prospects for this branch of biomedicine. Just over a dozen years have passed since scientist W. French Anderson fired the shot heard around the world by administering the first artificial gene to cure a hereditary illness. Since then we have learned more about the workings of human genes than in all of previous human history.

The theoretical understanding developed in genetics and the clinical advances in gene therapy over the past 50 years could render commonplace medical applications once viewed as unthinkable. In particular, the joining of the insights of the geneticist with advanced tools of information and computational science and fast-growing skills of the biomedical engineers promises to open up other frontiers we cannot yet imagine.
By now it has become clear that biology and biomedicine are rapidly becoming information sciences. Leading-edge biology is now commonly pursued in front of a computer as well as on the bench. Increasingly, mathematical,