Will bio-medical technology revolution be next?

Remember the 1960s movie the Graduate in which actor Dustin Hoffman is told

by a family friend that he should seek a career in "plastics." Today

that family friend would be smart to tell a graduating student that the most

promising of all careers over the next 20-30 years will not be in computers and

related IT sectors.

Instead the brightest career potential is likely the human body!!

Specifically, keeping the rapidly aging bodies of a vast generation of baby

boomers alive. With the help of the same incredible advances in computing and

electronics technologies that gave us all of the advanced technologies that we

now enjoy in our personal and professional lives, chemical and medical

scientists are now able to develop solutions that will dramatically improve the

quality of life in the medical sense.

Already the early signs of this new bio-medical technology revolution is

evident on television where a large percentage of commercials promote a new

generation of revolutionary drugs. In this field we have only barely scratched

the surface of what is possible. The Genome project alone will feed the

bio-medical industry with several generations worth of avenues of discovery and

business opportunity. What will drive this industry over the next 20 years is

the huge generation of well-to-do retiring baby boomers who will gladly pay just

about anything for just about everything that will prolong their ability to

boogie to the Rolling Stones, sip French wine and smoke Cuban cigars.

They will create a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars for drugs and

advanced medical treatments. But chances are that this future mega high-tech

industry is not rooted in the Silicon Valley. Medical technology is not a highly

centralized a phenomenon and the Valley's engineers are not likely to be turning

out better drugs and operating room equipment just because that's where the

money's at.

In closing, we can all thank Silicon Valley for the incredible advances it

has brought us, from the first transistor in 1949, the first integrated circuit,

the first pocket calculators and digital watches of the 1960s, memory ICs and

microprocessors, the personal computer, floppy and Winchester disk drives

including the Macintosh with its the graphics user interface, personal digital

assistants, and so on, and so on.

We can only hope that some genius Stanford graduate or high school drop-out

somewhere in his Silicon Valley garage or kitchen table is puzzling together the

next great solution that will spark a new generation of mind-boggling

innovation, investment and excitement that will build the next Intel,

Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Applied

Materials, Silicon Graphics, Atari, Oracle, Advanced Micro Devices, Fairchild

Semiconductor, Netscape, Google, Yahoo, National Semiconductor, Cadence, Lam

Research, PeopleSoft, Memorex, Varian Associates, 3Com, Amdahl, Tandem

Computers, Seagate Technologies, Intuit, Borland, and so on and so on.