And once we can modify the genomic code for medical purposes, we can apply the same technologies to various other industries including chemicals, cosmetics, food, drinks, energy, insurance, IT and military applications. Bioinformatic skills will be required across major swaths of the global economy.

We get a sense of how this could occur by looking at the expansion of data in historic terms. A project at the University of California at Berkeley attempted to measure the impact of going digital on the volume of data being generated by humans. It estimated that in 1999, the total of all human knowledge, music, images and words amounted to about 12 exabytes.

About 1.5 of those exabytes were generated during 1999 alone.

Some have argued that the study overstates the speed with which data accumulates. But even if that were true, the volume of bytes is growing so quickly that it would take only a few more years to achieve the data volume predicted by the study. As the cost of computing drops to 1-trillionth of what it was in 1940, and as evermore powerful machines come to market, we could soon record everything we read, hear or see throughout a lifetime.

The massive expansion of databases is not word-driven. Storing and transmitting paragraphs, even books, is a relatively low-bandwidth affair. A small book can be stored in one diskette. Music represents a leap in storage and transmission requirements. You can see the impact with the rise of music swapping programs. Few colleges were prepared for Napster; by the time 1 million downloads had occurred nationally, some colleges had used up all their bandwidth.

High-resolution photographs are another order of magnitude. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Actually a 4MB picture can be worth 400,000 words.

This is a significant change in terms of data flow. To put this new data volume in context, according to the Berkeley study, in 1999, the upper estimate of books being digitized annually was 8 terabytes, periodicals 12 terabytes, newspapers 25 terabytes, and all office documents 195 terabytes. This is trivial compared to the upper estimate of photographs; if digitized, the 80 billion photographs taken in 2000 would require about 400 petabytes of storage space. That is around 1,700 times the storage required for all text generated during the same period.

The life sciences will top that. Until very recently, there was little need to digitize and manage a lot of bits per patient. High-density, data-intensive applications, such as X-ray images, were printed rather than digitized. Unlike Sarah, patients had to seek and then carry the images physically from place to place.