Chips, Clones, and Living Beyond 100: How Far Will the Biosciences Take Us?

8. Scenarios up to 2025

Instead of describing multiple scenarios in detail, we examine the more extreme ones, to help set the range. The real future is bound to lie somewhere in between. Using the scenario framework of the previous chapter, we focus on scenarios A and D here. They represent cases in which the two key uncertainties—societal support and technological progress—both work either against or in favor of advances in biomedicine (see Figure 8.1). We build on the wildcards discussed in Chapter 7 and explore their medical, societal, and political interconnections in this chapter. Each scenario we depict concludes with an analogy from another industry where our basic scenario story already has played out. These analogous cases suggest that ...