"无知带来两种后果，或者是恐惧，或者是坐井观天。"---林永青
本书是近期美国的最热门畅销书之一，两月前
我在旧金山机场一看到这本书时就深深地为之震撼。目前正在联络国内相关出版社洽商中文版之事。（顺便说一句，出版中文译本不是什么重要的、或者需要依赖的事情。生活在21世纪的中国人，不应当再依赖于翻译后的中文版做为信息来源了。翻译的信息是非常有限的，而且严重受限于翻译者的业务水平和视野。全世界目前的知识，85%是用英语写就的。简单地说，那些现在的年纪在35岁以下，却还不能够直接用英文获取信息、或者用英文进行业务洽谈的经理人或企业家，都是没有前途的。---历史之鉴：中国企业家应当向日本学习。日本企业在崛起的过程中，那些最著名的企业家，如松下幸之助、本田宗一郞等，都在非常努力地学习英文。）
我每年阅读近千本书，而这是我看过的有关未来预测的、最准确且全面的一本。“技术就是社会，知识决定未来。”----我十分肯定地认为，不是金钱、也不是某几个政府或国家决定着世界的未来，而是人类自身的知识和思想，以及一些偶然性的社会或自然因素，成为最后的决定力量。
本书是一位著名的CNN记者的采访录，受访者中多达几十位都获得过不同领域的诺贝尔奖。他们中间有“互联网之父”、有人类基因图谱研究的负责人、有可再生能源研究的权威人物、有地球环境科学研究的领军人物、有人类神经网络研究的领军人物、有国家总统等等，都是当今对这个世界影响最深远的人物。因此，本书在序言的开篇，非常自信地说：“这是一本由带给我们未来的人所描绘的未来...”
以下摘录的是本书受访者简历。从他们的履历可以看出，他们的预言对于这个我们赖以生存的世界将会有怎么深刻而长远的影响...... (其中一位受访者著名未来学家James Canton, 被尊敬地称为“未来博士”，价值中国网做过专访。)
The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today
1. Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf is vice president of Google. Known as a “Father of the Internet,” his honors include the Predidential Medal of Freedom and the US National Medal of Technology.
2. Francis S. Collins
Francis S. collins, MD, PhD, is a geneticist who led the Human Genome project, the audacious effort that read out all three billion letters of the human DNA instruction book. He continues to lead the National Human Genome Research Institute and is also a leader in emphasizing the importance of addressing the ethical, legal, and social implications of genome research. In his recent book, the Language of God, he argues that science and faith are not opposing worldviews but actually are highly complementary.
3. George F. Smoot
George F. smoot, an astrophysicist, shares the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics with John Mather. He is on the faculty of the physics department at the University of California at Berkeley and conducts research in astrophysics and observational cosmology at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is co-author (with Keay Davidson) of Wrinkles in Time.
4. Christian de Duve
Christian de Duve, founder of the International Institute of Cellular and Molecular Pathology in Belgium, shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1974 for describing the structure and function of organelles in biological cells.
5. John R. Christy
Dr. John R. Christy is professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he studies global climate issues. He and Dr. Roy W. spencer were awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement for developing a global temperature data set from microwave data observed from satellites. Dr. Christy has served as a contributor and lead author for the UN reports bu the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in which the satellite temperatures were included as a high-quality data set for studying global climate change.
6. Louis J. Ignarro
Louis J. Ignarro, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology at the UCLA School of Medicine. He and two other researchers received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1998 for their three major discoveries involving nitric oxide as a unique signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system. He is the author of NO More Heart Disease: How Nitric Oxide Can Prevent—Even Reverse-Heart Disease and Strokes.
7. E. Fuller Torrey
Dr. E. Fuller Torrey is a research psychiatrist specializing in schizophrenia and manic-deressive illness. Called “the most famous psychiatrist in America” by the Washington Post, Dr. Torrey is president of the Treatment Advocacy Center and is associate director for Laboratory Research at the Stanley Medical Research Institute. Among his many awards are two commendation medals from the US Public Health Service and a humanitarian award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression.
8. Arthur Caplan
Arthur Caplan is chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and director the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes a column on bioethics for MSNBC.com and is a frequent commentator on various media outlets. He is the author of Smart Mice, Not So Smart People: An Interesting and Amusing Guide to Bioethics and Who Owns Life?
9. Wanda Jones
Dr.Wanda Jones is the director of the Office on Women’s Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she oversees ten areas of women’s health, including HIV/AIDS, cardiovascular disease, violence against women, diabetes and obesity, lupus, breastfeeding, and mental health. She was previously at the Centers for Disease Control, where she was active in policy issues related to HIV laboratory testing, women and AIDS, HIV vaccine development, and healthcare workers.
10. Craig Newmark
Craig Newmark is an Internet pioneer and founder of craigslist, the community bulletin board of the Internet.
11. Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil is an inventor whose developments include the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind and the first text-to-speech synthesizer. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and is the recipient of the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nationa’s largest awar in invention and innovation, and the National Medal of Technology, the nationa’s highest honor in technology. His latest book is The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
12. Thomas C. Schelling
Thomas C. Schelling, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005 for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis. Other honors include the National Academy of Sciences Award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War.
13. Chandrasekhar (Spike) Narayan
Spike Narayan holds a PhD in materials science and has been with IBM’s Research Division for over twenty years. His research inrerests are primarily in the area of materials and process technologies relevant to the semiconductor industry, and he has extensive experience in science and technology at the nanoscale.
14. James E. Cartwright
General James E. Cartwright is commander of United States Strategic Command, Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. He is responsible for the global command and control of US strategic forces to meet decisive national sevurity objectives. USSTRATCOM provides a broad range of strategic caoabilities and options for the president and secretary of defense.
15.Jody Williams
Jody Williams is a human rughts activist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, along with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines(ICBL), for her role as the founding coordinator of the ICBL,which achieved its goal of an international treaty banning antipersonnel landmines. She is now campaign ambassador of ICBL and founder of Nobel Women’s Initiative, a united effort to help strengthen work being done in support of women’s rights around the woeld. Forbes Magazine has named her one of the 100 most powerful women in the world.
16. Kim Dae-jung
Kim Dae-jung is the former president of the Republic of Korea. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his work for democracy and human rights in South Korea and in East Asia in general, and for peace and recinciliation with North Korea in particular.
17. Ronald Noble
Ronald Noble is secretary general of Interpol, the world’s largest international police organization.
18. Norman E. Borlaug
Norman E. Borlaug is an agricultural scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply. Called “the Father of the Green Revolution,” he has contributed to the growth of high-yielding wheat varieties, based partly on his research, on 200 million acres in the world. He is the recipient of the US Presidential Medals of Freedom and Science, the US congressional Gold Medal, and the National Service Medal of the US National Academies of Science.
19. Richard Clarke
Richard Clarke served as national coordinator for security and counterterrorism for President Clinton and President George W. Bush.
He was the special adviser to the president for Cyberspace Security and chairman of the president’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board. He is chairman of Good Harbor Consulting and the author of Against All Enemies and Scorpion’s Gate, a novel of espionage and counterterrorism set in a not-too- distant future.
20. Richard Restak
Richard Restak is a neurologist and neuropsychiatrist and the author of eighteen books on the human brain, including The Naked Brain: How the Emerging Neurosociety Is Changing How We Live, work, and Love. He is president of the American Neuropsychiatric Association.
21. Sandra Postel
Samdra Postel is director of the Global Water Policy Project and current director of the Center for the Envionment at Mount Holyode College. She is the author of Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity, the basis of a PBS documentary, Pillar Of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last?, and co-author of Rivers for Life: Managing Water for People and Nature. Postel is a 1995 Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment and, in 2002, was named one of the “Scientific American
22.Gerardus’t Hooft
Gerardus’t Hooft, professor of theoretical physics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1999 for having placed particle physics theory on a firmer mathematical foundation.
23. Shigeo Hirose
Shigeo Hirose is a multi-award-winning professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He specializes in the creative design of robotic systems.
24. Peter Doherty
Perter Doberty is an immunologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1996 for discoveries concerning the specificity of the cellmediated immune defense. He studies viral immunity and splits his life between St.Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the University of Melbourne, and the beaches of southeastern Australia. His recent books include The Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize and A Light History of Hot Air.
25. Stuart L.Pimm
Stuart L. Pimm is a conservation biologist whose gocus is the study and prevention of species extinctions worldwide. He is the recipient of the Dr.A.H.Heineken Prize in Environmental Sciences from The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
26. Malcolm Bricklin
Malcolm Bricklin, founder and CEO of Visionary Vehicles, is recogniazed as one of the automobile aindustry’s foremost entrepreneurs. He is also the founder of Subaru of America and Yugo America and is currently working on the design, engineering, import, and distribution of a “ signature” line of electric cars and light trucks from China into North America.
27.Abdulla Salem El-Badri
Abdulla Salem El-Badri is secretary general of the Organization of the Petroleum, Exporting Countries(OPEC).
28.Lee H. Hamilton
Lee H. Hamilton is director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Center on Congress at Indiana University. He was vice-chair of the 9/11 commission and co-chair of the Iraq Study Group.
He served for thirty-four years in the United States Congress and chaired the House Committees on Foreign Affairs and Intelligence.
29. Steven Beckwith
Steven Beckwith is an astronomer and director of the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University, which runs the science operations for the Hubble Space Telescope.
30. Tim Mack
Tim Mack is president of The World Future Society, a non-profit, non- partisan scientific and technological developments are shaping the future.
31.Marian Wright Edelman
Marian Wright Edelman is founder and president of the children’s Defense Fund(CDF), the nation’s strongest independent voice for children and families. She was the first black woman admitted to the Mississppi Bar, where she directed the NAACP legal Defense and Educational Fund. Honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Macarthur Foundation Prize Fellowship, and the Robert F.Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for her writings, which include eight books.
32. Valli Moosa
Valli Moosa is president of The World Vonservation Union(IUCN), the world’s largest conservation network. The union brings together 83 states, 110government agencies, more than eight hundred non-governmental organizations, and ten thousand scientists and experts from 181 countries in an effort to influence, encourage, and assist societies to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable.
33.Leon E.Panetta and James D.Watkins
The Honorable Leon E.Panetta and Admiral James D.Watkins are co-chairs of the Hoint Ocean Commission Initiative.
Leon E.Panetta served as chief of staff for President Clinton and was chairman of the Pew Oceans Commission. He is also director of the Leon & sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy, California State University at Minterey Bay.
Admiral James D. Watkins’s forty-year naval career culminated in attaining the Navy’s highest uniformed office, chief of naval operations. He is a former secertary of energy.
34. Aaron Ciechanover
Dr. Aaron Ciechanover, a Distinguished Research Professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2004 for his work with two other scientists in discovering ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. This discovery creates an opportunity to develop more effective drugs against cervical cancer, cystic fibrosis, and other diseases.
35. Elias A. Zerhouni
Elias A. Zerhouni, MD, is director of the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s medical research agency.
36. Nancy G. Brinker
Nancy G. Brinker is founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the world’s Largest Grassroots network of breast cancer survivors and activists. She has served on the president’s Cancer Panel and as US Ambassador to the Republic of Hungary and currently serves as Chief of Protocol at the US Department of State.
37. Stanley B.Prusiner
Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1997 for his groundbreaking discovery of a new class of disease-causing agents called prions.
38. Victor Sidel
Victor Sidel, a physician and professor of social medicine at Montefiore Medical Center, was co-founder and co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War(IPPNW), the organization that received the Noble Health Asspciation, he is co-editor with Dr. Barry Levy of War and Public Health, Terrorism and Public Health, and Socoal Injustice and Public Health, all published by Oxford University Press.
39.Claude Mandil
Claude Mandil is executive director of the international Energy Agency.
He is the former chairman and CEO of the institut Francais du Petrole( The French Oil Institute) and has many high-level positions in the French government and in the energy and research sectors.
40. Nancy Ho
Nancy Ho is a leading scientist in ethanol energy research. She received the R&D 100 Award for genetically modifying yeast to convert sugar into fule. She is a reaearch molecular biologist and group leader of the Molecular Genetics Group at the Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering at Purdue University.
41. Michael Shermer
Dr. Michael Shermer is executive director of the Sheptics Society and the author of Why Darwin Matters: Evolution and the Case Against Intelligent Design and How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God. He is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American.
42. Joseph L. Bryant
Joseph L. Bryant, DVM, is director of the Animal model Division of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. As a researcher, his primary responsibility is developing animal models for studying the pathogenesis of AIDS and cancers.
43. Barry Marshall
Barry Marshall, senior principal research fellow in the School of Biomedical, Biomolecular& Chemical Sciences at the University of Western Australia, shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005 with Robin Warren for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter Pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease.
44.Carl Pope, Daniel Becker, and Allison Forbes
Carl Pope is executive director of the Sierra Club, America’s oldest. Largest, and ost influential grassroots environmental organization. Daniel Becker and Allison Forbes are director and conservation organizer, respectively, of Sierra Club’s Global Warming Program.
45. Keith B. Richburg
Keith B. Richburg is a longtime reporter and foreign correspondent for the Washingtong Post, serving as Bureau Chief in Manila, Nairobi, Hong Kong, and Paris. During his nineteen years abroad for the Post, he covered the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, the start of the 2001 Palestinian Intifada, the 1997 Hong Kong handover to China, the 1992 US intervention in Somalia, and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. He is the author of Out of America: A black Man Confronts Africa and a member of the Council on Foreign Relation.
46. Gregory A. Poland
Gregory A. Poland is professor of medicine, infectious diseases, and molecular pharmacology and experimental therapeutics at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, and director of the Mayo Vaccine Research Group and the Program in Translational Immunovirology and Biodefense.
47. Earl G. Brown
Earl G. Brown, a specialist in influenza virus evolution, is a virologist in the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa.
48. Crol Bellamy
Crol Bellamy served as the executive director of UNICEF and was the first former volunteer to serve as director of the Peace Corps. She is currently president and CEO of World Learning, and international nonprofit organization with operations in seventy-seven countries that fosters global citizenship through experiential education and community-based development work.
49. James Canton
James Canton is CEO and chairman of the Institute for Global Futures and author of The Extreme Future: The Top Trends That Will Reshape the World for the Next 5,10 and 20 Years and Technofutures: How Leading-Edge Innovations Will Transform Business in the 21st Century. Named “The Digital Guru” by CNN and “Dr. Future” by Yahoo, he is an authority on future trends in innovation.
50. Douglas Osheroff
Douglas Osheroff, professor of physics and applied physics at Stanford University, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996 for discovery of superfluidity in helium-3.
51. Lyman Page
Lyman Page is a cosmologist and professor of physics at princeton University, where he measures the spatial temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background, the thermanl afterglow of the big bang.
52.Carol M. Browner
Carol M. Browner is the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, where she championed common-sense, cost-effective solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental and public health challenges. She is now a principal of The Albright Group LLC, a global strategy firm.
53.Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins, FRS, is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford. He is the author of nine books, inckuding The Selfish Gene and Unweaving the Rainbow.
54. Peter Marra
Peter Marra is a research scientist at the Smithsonian Miagratiory Bird Center of the National Zoological Park and a leading researcher in the area of migratory bird ecology.
55. Nsedu Obot-Witherspoon
Nsedu Obot-Witherspoon is executive director of The Children’s Environmental Health Network, a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to protect the chikd and the fetus from environmental health hazards and promote a healthy environment.
56. William H. Meadows
Bill Meadows is President of The Wilderness Society, whose mission is to protect and conserve America’s wilderness and roadless areas, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and national forests.
57. Lawrence M. Krauss
Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist and director of the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of numerous bestselling books, including The Phsics of Star Trek, Atom, and , most recently, Hiding in the Mirror.
58. John C. Mather
Dr. John C. Mather, who shares the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with George Smoot, is a senior astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA’S Goddard Space Flight Center. He is senior project scientist of the James Webb Space Telescope.
59. Ahmed Zewail
Ahmed Zewail was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering development in femtoscience, making possible the observation of phenomena in a millionth of a billionth of a second. He is chair professor of chemistry and physics and director of the Center for Physical Biology at Caltech. Postage stamps have been issued to honorhis contributions to science and humanity.
60. Ross Gelbspan
Ross Gelbspan was an editor and reporter for thirty years with the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for editing in 1994. He is the author of two books on the global climate, The Heat Is On and Boiling Point. Now retired from daily journalism, Gelbspan is the Creator and Author of the Website www.heatisonline.org.