Tabla de Contenidos:
  • Executive summary
  • Framing the issue
  • Committee charge and process
  • Emerging technologies in the life sciences
  • Notable features of technological growth in the life sciences
  • Definitions
  • 20th century germ-based biowarfare
  • Beating nature: is it possible to engineer a "better pathogen"
  • Natural threats, the evolution of pathogenicity: what does it take to cause disease?
  • The importance of the host response
  • Advancing technologies will alter the future threat spectrum
  • The development and use of biological weapons
  • Biological weapons are fundamentally different from other "weapons of mass destruction"
  • The "arms race" metaphor and the difficult issue of secrecy
  • The need to strike a balance: benefits of technological growth
  • The dual-use dilemma
  • Committee process
  • Report road map.
  • Global drivers and trajectories of advanced life science technologies
  • The global marketplace
  • The Pharmaceutical industry
  • Global growth of the biotechnology industry
  • The Fledgling nanobiotechnology industry
  • Agricultural biotechnology
  • Industrial biotechnology
  • Biodefense
  • Global dispersion of knowledge
  • Global Scientific productivity
  • Global growth in biotech patent activity
  • Information technology
  • Global dispersion of people
  • Trends in higher education
  • Snapshot of the global technology landscape
  • East Asia and the Pacific
  • Eastern Europe and Central Asia
  • Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Middle East and North Africa
  • South Asia
  • Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Advances in technologies with relevance to biology: the future landscape
  • A classification scheme for biological technologies
  • Acquisition of novel biological or molecular diversity
  • DNA synthesis
  • DNA shuffling
  • Bioprospecting
  • Combinatorial chemistry: generating chemical diversity
  • High throughput screening
  • Directed design
  • Rational drug design
  • Synthetic biology
  • Genetic engineering of viruses
  • Understanding and manipulating biological systems
  • RNA interference
  • High affinity binding reagents (aptamers and tadpoles)
  • Computational biology and bioinformatics
  • Systems biology
  • Genomic medicine
  • Modulators of homeostatic systems
  • Production, delivery and packaging
  • Plants as production platforms: "biopharming"
  • Microfluidics and microfabrication
  • Nanotechnology
  • Aerosol technology
  • Microencapsulation technology
  • Gene therapy technologies
  • Targeting biologically active materials to specific locations in the body
  • The complementarity and synergy of technologies
  • Conclusions and recommendations
  • Appendixes.