The technologies featured in the special issue have little to do
with the latest crop of gadgets and gizmos. Technology Review
editors have searched university and corporate labs around the
world to find new areas of technology that promise to transform
industries such as computing, medicine, manufacturing,
transportation, and energy. For each technology, Technology
Review has profiled one researcher or research team whose work
exemplifies the field's possibilities. The field Paulson
represents, "glycomics," is the scientific pursuit of
identifying and studying all of the carbohydrate molecules
produced by an organism such as a human or mouse. Like
proteomics, the study of all the proteins produced by an
organism, glycomics is important for unraveling the mysteries of
the recently solved human genome because more than half of all
the proteins in the human body have carbohydrate molecules
attached. The precise interactions between carbohydrates and
proteins continue to mystify scientists, though, because carbo