Physicists have long sought their grand “theory of everything,” but in the decades ahead, it is biology that will supply the one, grand conceptual category in which most aspects of human health, wealth, and happiness come together. The strength of our economy, the disease resistance of our children, the question of how long we live—even deeper questions such as what is life and who (or what?) is human—are all subject to the influence of the new world of life sciences, their emerging technologies, and the business acumen of those building industries to extract value from these sciences.

Above all, the life sciences are being transformed by the global nature of research and development, an enterprise in which the same or similar efforts are moving at different speeds in different places, with different values, different levels of government regulation, different elements of integration, and with different incentives and costs structures. Meanwhile, the life sciences themselves are being transformed by changing demographics, a confluence of technology, a global market, and an increasing array of options for extending human lifespan—a development that will perplex economists as much as ethicists. As we give ever more people the prospect of living ever longer, we will be forced to wrestle with the question of just how much longevity our society can afford, and what such a shift in the demographic center of gravity will mean.

Every entrepreneur in every startup is competing everywhere, accessing science everywhere, from day one. Intellectual property is a global issue, from day one. Capital is global. And the Web provides for real time, global collaboration never before imagined. For example, bioengineering researchers at UC San Diego have assembled a virtual human metabolic network that will give researchers a new way to hunt for better treatments for hundreds of disorders, from diabetes to high levels of cholesterol in the blood. This novel metabolic network builds on the sequencing of the human genome and contains more than 3,300 known human biochemical transformations that have been documented during 50 years of research worldwide. UCSD has made it available free online for any researcher in the world to use. The dark side of “one world” is that disease vectors do not understand borders, and people travel with pathogens riding their coattails.

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