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" ESQUIRE ASKED ME to make a list describing five things that I wish to see happen before I die. Since I am approaching my eightieth birthday and the prospect of being put into the deep freeze for later resuscitation is not on my list of wishes, I cannot expect any of my more interesting wishes to be fulfilled in the short time I have left. If any world-shaking events happen in my remaining lifetime, they are unlikely to be events that a sane person would wish for. My main wish for the time I shall still be around is to see my grandchildren grow up in a peaceful world. So I decided to change the rules and make a list of wishes that have a chance of being fulfilled in a hundred years rather than in ten. These are wishes for my grandchildren rather than for me. /// ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF SOTO  1} UNDERSTANDING WHAT MAKES US HUMAN. We now know that our genes are about 98 percent identical to the genes of chimpanzees, but humans and chimpanzees are profoundly and obviously different. If we could understand why we are different, we would gain new insight into the essence of our humanity. We might even be able to deal better with the disagreeable aspects of human nature, with the seven deadly sins that are the price we pay for being human. The most promising road to understanding seems to be the study of development of babies and young children, human and chimpanzee, with precise observations of the genetic and neurological processes that are active at each stage of development. The tools for these precise observations do not yet exist, but they are likely to exist before the twenty-first century is over. I was reminded of our ignorance of these matters when my grandson George, eight years old at the time, asked me the question &amp;quot;Why am I me?&amp;quot; The question has a special meaning when George asks it because he has an identical twin brother, Donald. George and Donald share not only the same genes but also the same environment and the same upbringing. I cannot tell them apart unless they are wearing different clothes. They love to be together and have never been separated for more than a few hours. And still they are different people. George is better at baseball, and Donald is better at playing the violin. George knows well that he is George and not Donald. He would like to understand why. When we can answer his question, we will have understood something important about human nature. 2} SEEING THE FIRST BIOTECH GAMES FOR CHILDREN ON THE MARKET. Fifty years ago in Princeton, I watched the mathematician John von Neumann designing and building the first electronic computer that operated with instructions coded into the machine. Von Neumann did not invent the electronic computer. The computer called ENIAC had been running at the University of Pennsylvania five years earlier. What von Neumann invented was software, the coded instructions that gave the computer agility and flexibility. It was the combination of electronic hardware with punch-card software that allowed a single machine to predict weather, to simulate the evolution of populations of living creatures, and to test the feasibility of hydrogen bombs. Von Neumann understood that his invention would change the world. He understood that the descendants of his machine would dominate the operations of science and business and government. But he imagined computers always remaining large and expensive. He imagined them as centralized facilities serving large research laboratories or large industries. He failed to foresee that computers would grow smaller and smaller rather than larger and larger. He failed to foresee computers growing small enough and cheap enough to be used by housewives for doing income-tax returns or by kids for doing homework. He failed to foresee the final domestication of computers as toys for three-year-olds. He totally failed to foresee the emergence of computer games as a dominant feature of twenty-first-century life. Because of computer games, our grandchildren are now growing up with an indelible addiction to computers. For better or for worse, in sickness or in health, till death do us part, humans and computers are now joined together more durably than husbands and wives. What has this story of von Neumann&amp;#039;s computer and the evolution of computer games to do with biotechnology? Simply this, that there is a close analogy between von Neu-mann&amp;#039;s vision of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception today of genetic engineering as an activity of large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto. The public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for poisonous pesticides into food crops, just as we used to distrust von Neumann because von Neumann liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen bombs. It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations. I am wishing that the biotechnical industry will follow the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized. For biotechnology to become domesticated, the first step is for it to become user-friendly. There should be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners, who will use genetic engineering to breed new varieties of roses and orchids, and also kits for dog and cat lovers to breed new varieties of pets. Once it gets into the hands of private citizens, genetic engineering will lead to an explosion in diversity of new living creatures rather than to the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. The final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be the biotech game, played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Playing such games, kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms that they are designing. The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur.  3} UNDERSTANDING WHY WE HAVE ICE AGES. Less than two hundred years ago, we learned that the climate of the earth in past ages was radically different from the present climate. We learned that the northern parts of Europe and North America were covered with massive ice sheets, and the parts not covered with ice were much cooler than they are today. Later we learned that there have been not one but many ice ages, following one another at intervals of about a hundred thousand years. Each ice age lasts about ninety thousand years, and then there is a warm interval of about ten thousand years before the next ice age begins. The most remarkable fact is that we are now living in a warm period that has lasted twelve thousand years, so the next ice age is already overdue. Another remarkable fact is that we have no understanding of the causes of ice ages and no ability to predict them. The reason why ice ages occur is still a mystery, and the date of onset of the next ice age is as unpredictable as the date of the next eruption of Mount St. Helens. All we know is that Mount St. Helens will erupt again sometime, and the next ice age will begin sometime if we do not take action to prevent it.  During recent years there has been intense debate about the effects of human activities on climate. The prevailing view is that human activities are causing a warming of the climate, with accompanying changes in rainfall and snowfall and a slow rise in sea level. These changes are important, but they are insignificant compared with the effects of a new ice age. A new ice age would wipe whole countries off the map and leave the coastal cities of the world high and dry. The most important question that we need to answer is whether the warming of the climate due to human activities is making the onset of the next ice age more probable or less probable. The experts on climate disagree. Some experts say the warming makes a new ice age more probable because it changes the pattern of circulation of cold water in the deep oceans. Other experts say the warming makes a new ice age less probable because it prevents winter snowfall from lasting through the summer. To decide which opinion is correct, we need to understand the causes of ice ages. So long as we do not understand ice ages, we do not understand climate. So long as we do not understand climate, we cannot know which human activities are harmful and which are helpful. 4} SEEING LIFE TAKE ROOT AWAY FROM THE EARTH. We do not know whether any life now exists away from the earth. All we know is that we have not found any life or traces of life in the places we have explored. The entire universe outside the earth, so far as we can see, looks dead. We see dead planets, dead moons, dead asteroids, and dead stars. We see life only on our own planet, where a marvelously diverse and abundant collection of creatures live together in a small space. The contrast between the living earth and the dead universe is to me a call to action. How much more beautiful the universe would be if these dead planets and moons were brought to life! A dead planet may sometimes be beautiful, but the same planet teeming with bees and birds and butterflies would be far more beautiful. During the next hundred years, humans will develop the biological science and technology that will enable us to create new species of plants and animals and microbes adapted to survive in strange environments never seen on earth. We will be able to breed potatoes to grow wild on Mars or butterflies to fly in space using the pressure of sunlight on their wings to navigate.  When we plant potatoes on Mars or butterflies among the rings of Saturn, we will not be dealing with single species but with whole ecologies. Everywhere that life is planted, it must come with a large assortment of microbes and plants and animals to sustain itself and create its own environment. Once it is planted, it will continue to evolve by the normal processes of natural variation and selection. Humans may be the midwives to bring life to birth in distant places, but once life is on its way, it will grow and evolve and spread without our help. Some of us may choose to go along with it and share the adventure of colonizing the universe. But to me it is not the human settlement of space that is important. It is life as a whole that I wish to see expanding. 5} UNDERSTANDING HOW LIFE BEGAN. The origin of life is the deepest mystery in the whole of science. Many books and learned papers have been written about it, but it remains a mystery. There is an enormous gap between the simplest living cell and the most complicated naturally occurring mixture of nonliving chemicals. We have no idea when and how and where this gap was crossed. We know only that it was crossed somehow, either on earth or on Mars or in some other place from which the ancestors of life on earth might have come. If we can understand how life began, we shall also gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be alive. There will probably be no single road to understanding. We must explore on at least three of the frontiers of science. First, the chemical frontier, exploring the chains of chemical reactions that might bridge the gap between living and nonliving. Second, the environmental frontier, exploring the history of the various environments on the earth and wherever else life might have germinated. Third, the organizational frontier, exploring the deep structure of living cells and the organization of the intricate processes that give them integrity and durability.  Until we understand how life began, we have no way to calculate how likely or unlikely it may be for indigenous life to exist elsewhere in the universe. Carl Sagan and some other famous astronomers believed strongly that life is abundant on millions of planets all over our galaxy. Biologists generally tend to believe that life is a rare accident, unlikely to be abundant and possibly existing nowhere else except on earth. No matter whether life turns out to be abundant or rare, we shall continue searching. If we ever discover an alien life-form that originated independently, that will be an enormous help to us in understanding how life began. When I wish for a solution to the mystery of the origin of life, I am also wishing for a glimpse of an alien creature swimming in an alien ocean. THE WISHES THAT I HAVE been writing about came from my head, not from my heart. They are my wishes as a scientist, not as a human being. I chose them because they are intellectually interesting, not because they are emotionally compelling. If I had chosen wishes that came from the heart, the list would have been very different. I would have wished for a world without nuclear weapons, for a world without war, for cures for cancer and for AIDS, for a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor in our country and throughout the world, and for a stop to the destruction of wildlife on land and in the oceans. These wishes of the heart are familiar to everybody. I have nothing new to say about them, which is why I chose not to write about them. Though I wrote about esoteric wishes that appeal to me as a scientist, the most important wishes are the ordinary wishes that we all share.  THREE GENIUSES: A WISH LIST What innovation do you regret not having seen in your lifetime? JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, economist and former ambassador, 94: I would like to see a different way of measuring economic success. We now measure it by the total of the gross national product, the total production of goods and services. I would like to see more attention given to the content--the arts, for example, or medical development (although there we don&amp;#039;t do so badly). Civilized development doesn&amp;#039;t consist of only producing automobiles. Some of this would come about with a better distribution of income. But the main thing is moving our educational and cultural life into the areas of civilized enjoyments-- the arts, science, behavioral motivations, a whole list of things that are not part of our measurement of progress. It is particularly important that this view comes from an economist. EDWIN KREBS, Nobel-prize-winning biochemist, 85: I still think there is a fairly general cause of cancer. And as both a scientist and as someone whose family has been touched by the disease, I would like to see a cure applicable to all cancers. It&amp;#039;s not going to come about all at once. It will be an incremental process. But the rate of medical discovery is accelerating, and we are in a very strong growth period. I think once the basic causes are really understood, the treatment will rapidly follow. The next ten years will be dramatic. EDWARD ALBEE, Pulitzer-prize-winning playwright, 75: I was an orphan raised in a wealthy family and educated in private schools. I had teachers who were capable of teaching the arts. I keep hoping our country will eventually have an educational system that will be able to make people understand that the arts are essential to their understanding of what it is to be alive. Our educational system is failing more and more in doing that. Until people are taught to expect something serious and good out of the arts, the arts are always going to be crippled in this country--and so are its people. You&amp;#039;ve got to start paying teachers more than you pay garbagemen.  --As told to Mathew Martz and Greg Veis "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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