BYTE.com > Features > 2003
The BCS/IEE's Turing Lecture 2003
By Joe McCool
February 24, 2003
(The BCS/IEE's Turing Lecture 2003
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If we are to believe Dr. Carol Kovac of IBM, we will soon expect a
lifetime of 103 years. Almost 500 people were enthralled by her when she
recently delivered the annual Turing Lecture to the British Computer
Society/Institution of Electrical Engineers (http://www1.bcs.org.uk/).
Kovac predicts that as the genome project matures, advances
in pharmaceutical research and treatment will improve life expectancy
by 33 years, within her lifetime. She expects an improvement of 20 years within
the next decade. Infectious diseases will not be the killers as before;
heart attacks, cancer and strokes will replace them as killers. But
genome profiling will identify susceptibilities.
When asked if progress on the genome project would eventually render
doctors redundant, Kovac, who is responsible for IBM's overall
strategy for Life Sciences, answered with an emphatic "no." New
technology will augment the general practicioner's arsenal of tools, just as previous
technology has done. She gave the same answer to a question on whether
or not computers will match the human brain: "Not in my lifetime."
"Doctors will have to adjust their training however," she added. "They
will have to learn to work with database people. Biologists too will
have to overcome their reluctance for mathematics."
Already a chip from
Orchid can predict patient responses to particular
treatment. Doctors, however, are notoriously reluctant to take up database technology. In the U.S., Kovac says,
doctors are still refusing to
use e-mail or provide web sites: a trend that will have to change.
It is true that
when genome information becomes readily available on the Internet, patients
may attempt to gather their own data and perform their own diagnoses. Facing a patient
armed with a self-generated prognosis will create
substantial challenges for the general practitioner. According to Kovac, doctors in the UK
will readily admit that school teachers are often their worst patients.
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