Growing human organs to ease the deadly shortages facing patients desperate for transplants. Deploying organic molecules to store a million times more data than silicon can. Harnessing the unused processing power on your desktop to attack gigantic computational problems, from genetic analysis to spotting hidden customer trends. Massively expanding the data capacity of optical networks to turbocharge the information superhighway. Modifying plants to grow cheap, lifesaving vaccines.
If these sound like far-out, grandly ambitious ideas-well, they are. But they may touch your life sooner than you think, since all of these conceptions are close enough to reality to have received patents in the year 2000. And, as a result of this combination of sweeping vision and nitty-gritty reality, they’ve been selected by the editors of Technology Review for “5 Patents to Watch,” a special section highlighting some of last year’s most intriguing and potentially world-changing patents.
Of course, we cannot say with certainty which of the 182,223 patents issued last year by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will prove to be the most significant in the long run. And the insiders in this game know that. When Technology Review asked MIT Technology Licensing Office director Lita Nelsen to help pinpoint last year’s most significant patents, she just chuckled: “You want to borrow my dart board?”
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.
