Foreword This book takes the reader on a virtual journey into the future, to imagine the consequences of the convergence of life science break- throughs and information technology advances. We have already seen the impact of this convergence on lengthened life expectancies, thanks to personalized medicine, remote diagnostics, biosensors, tissue engineering, and precision imaging that reveals the disease process. Yet these are still early days. Paul and Joyce Schoemaker provide a splendid "tour of the horizon" that considers the break- through consequences of current and future developments. For each of the possibilities that can be envisioned, there are profound personal (What quality of life will I have?), social (How will family relationships change?), regulatory and ethical (Who decides what should be encouraged?), economic (Can society afford a rapidly aging population?), and business (Who will capture the economic value that is created?) implications. As with any disruptive technology wave, clear business winners and losers will emerge. But especially in this case, we expect that the real beneficiaries will be individuals and their families. The path of the biosciences revolution will be strewn with scien- tific dead ends, ethical dilemmas, failed experiments, public anxiety, and recurring budget crises--but also with as-yet-unknown scientific breakthroughs. We don't know how these uncertainties will play out in the next 10 to 15 years, but the range of possibilities can be captured by the scenarios introduced in Chapter 7, "Wildcards for the Future." This is where I enter the picture as Co-director of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at the Wharton School, where Paul serves as Research Director. Our Mack Center was the sponsor of the original scenario study on the "Future of the Biosciences" in 2005. This was one of our most successful initiatives: We became a credible and informed player in the ongoing debate about the role of emerging technologies in the biosciences, building on our decade- long inquiry into the challenges of managing emerging technologies across a wide range of industries. In 2003, we concluded that the