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The 1999 TR100

Meet 100 young innovators poised to shape technology. See the future through their eyes.
November 1, 1999

In 1999, Technology Review asked its readers to find the worlds most remarkable young innovators. From your nominations, a panel of editors and academics selected 100 men and women under age 35 at the forefront of their respective fields. Read on to learn about these young leaders, how we chose them, and the unique conference that brought them together.

Profiles

Weve written concise profiles of every one of the TR100the most remarkable group of young innovators ever assembled. Weve divided the profiles into five groups corresponding to subjects that are most frequently covered in Technology Review: Software, Biotechnology, the World Wide Web, Materials Science, and Hardware. Each profile tells you, cleanly and crisply, why this is an innovator to watch.

Trends in Technology

Once wed assembled the TR100, we realized that this group of brilliant young people are better positioned than anyone else to see the future of technology. So we used their amazing brainpower to answer a top-of-mind question: What are the most important technological trends of the next decade? Weve summarized their answers in each of the five technology areas.

Biotech: What do you get when you cross a biologist, an engineer and tons of data? Fantastic possibilities for biomedicine. Hardware: The future of hardware? Ubiquitous robots, printable PCs and exotic computing technologies, say the TR100. Materials: In the next decade the right stuff could give us tiny computers, flexible microelectronicseven safer and more effective drugs. Software: Applications will soon disappear from the desktop and pop up in a variety of unexpected places, say the TR100. WWW: Could the next ten years be as dramatic for the Web and telecommunications as the last ten? The TR100 say without a doubt.

Themes in Doing Research

As we profiled the TR100, two themes emerged: the increasing scale of technology collaborations, and the growing ease with which innovators move between academia and the private sector. Two short pieces highlight these trends.

Collaboration: From software to genomics, research is going global. Academia vs. Industry: young innovators ask: Why choose?

How We Did It

We rounded this special section off with a story that takes you behind the scenes and lets you in on how we picked the winners.

The rest of this article can be found here.

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