Today’s experiments hint at tomorrow’s technology

Someday, perhaps not long from now, automobiles will be powered by hydrogen fuel cells with individual motors built into each wheel for better traction and other key parts built into a chassis on top of which the body locks, like a laptop to a docking station. Medicine developed for particular diabetes sufferers will help them avoid secondary effects of the disease, like blindness and amputations of toes or legs. Environmental sensors will keep tabs on air and water sources in animal habitats so that scientists will be able to quell problems before they veer out of control.

General Motors Corp. (GM) has developed just such a concept vehicle, while Pfizer Inc. is at work on targeted drugs, and Intel Corp. is working with scientists on electronic methods for watching over parts of the planet that aren’t so easy to get to or keep an eye on, said research and development executives from all three companies who spoke at the Technology Review Emerging Technologies Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Wednesday.

“This is a level of granularity that these researchers never had before,” said David Tennenhouse, Intel vice president of corporate technology and director of research, regarding work being done at Great Duck Island, Maine. Wireless network sensors there monitor microclimates in and around nesting burrows of Leach’s Storm Petrels, a western North Atlantic seabird that returns to land only during the breeding season. The goal of wireless monitoring is to watch over habitats without the disruption that the presence of humans can cause to animals. A Web site, http://www.greatduckisland.net, provides access to live photos and sensor readings.

Advanced computing methods will also lead to “machine learning,” where known data sets are analyzed by computers which then offer, for instance, the top five hypotheses to scientists. Such computing doesn’t cut out the human equation, but potentially increases productivity by offering possible hypotheses that humans can then check out, Tennenhouse said.

This could leave more time for driving the cool new vehicles that will be on the road.

Lawrence Burns, vice president of research and development and planning at GM, showed off a concept car that looked something like the comic book superhero Batman’s Batmobile from the recent series of movies — a sleek, powerful and fast automobile, though in this case silver instead of black. The concept car is meant to reinvent automobiles, which haven’t fundamentally changed over time except in design. Cars still rely on petroleum and internal combustion systems, Burns said.

To accelerate the concept car, the driver twists a control and squeezes it to brake, rather than using foot pedals. The steering wheel needs just a slight movement to turn the vehicle. Better yet for some drivers, “if your wife is ragging you about where you are, you can hand her the controls,” Burns said.

Sitting in the interior will be like sitting in the living room, looking out a wide picture window to survey the surroundings from a chair that tilts comfortably, he said. Computer controls and GPS (Global Positioning System) will allow drivers to tell what is around them outside of the vehicle so that there won’t be any excuse for bashing into curbs and failing to notice signal lights.

Though currently a concept car, “it’s very, very promising,” Burns said, and has the potential to help reduce dependence on petroleum, which has all manner of implications from the economy to the environment. GM has a target date of 2010 for having some form of the hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle on the market.

Considering that medical advances could have a lot of people living a whole lot longer, that, too, could be a welcome technological change. Pfizer has 210 products in development, with 100 new medicines in the works and the rest consisting of enhancements to existing products. Twenty new “very significant” medicines from Pfizer are slated to reach the global market between now and 2006, said Peter Corr, the company’s senior vice president of science and technology. Among those are drugs that treat a range of maladies, including insomnia, macular degeneration and HIV.

Increasingly, existing drugs will be used to treat symptoms, diseases and conditions other than those they were designed for, he said, emphasizing a trend in medicine that came up at various points during the conference sessions. One example that has gotten attention lately is Viagra, Pfizer’s drug for treating erectile dysfunction. It is currently being evaluated as a treatment for pulmonary hypertension, a rare but potentially deadly disorder in the pulmonary artery, which leads from the lungs to the heart.

Of concern to more people could be finding ways to treat or stave off Alzheimer’s disease, a disorder that causes the loss of brain cells and is the leading cause of dementia. “Many of us in this room will reach 85 (years old),” Corr said, looking out on hundreds of people in MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, “and 50 percent of us who reach 85 will develop Alzheimer’s,” potentially requiring years of care. That statistic brought gasps and exclamations of “50 percent!” from some in the audience.

There are two choices for dealing with the swelling number of people who will live longer and therefore develop diseases that come with aging, he said. “We can start building more nursing homes now or we can invest in technology that will halt the progression of Alzheimer’s and lead to earlier diagnosis,” he said.