An essay on the future of h-2 serology

Listening to Lee Hood describe his futuristic visions of immunology-nay, of biology-it is easy to feel like a cripple in the midst of Olympic sprinters. DNA sequencing, for example, will be entirely automatized: In the future, you will simply drop a tiny speck of tissue into one end of a machine and then collect the data, digested for your convenience by a computer, at the other. The scale of work will be reduced to picogram quantities, a mere nothing compared to the scale you work on now. You will hardly need to spend any time in the laboratory; you will just stop by in the morning to turn on the robotics, and while you are on a lecture tour or fishing in the bay of Baja California, they will slave away for you like zombies in a third-rate horror movie. You won't even need to think; artificial brains will do that for you. And when it comes time to write a paper, there will be a computer program for that too, with standardized columns like those on a tax-return form. The word processors of the nth generation will actually be data processors: They will know what to do with experimental results much better than you, and they will turn out fool-proof manuscripts above the criticism of any reviewer. Correction: Actually, in the future, there will be no manuscripts, no papers, no journals; all communication will be via computer. At some point communication may even be strictly amongst computers, and then you will have nothing to say to all this at all.