WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
Pioneers think big. It wasn't small-mindedness that led Lewis and Clark to conquer the Rocky Mountains, or Gordon Moore to predict the exponential growth of computing power. Name a challenge today, and chances are you will find a company with world-altering answers. Want proof? Meet some of the 2004 Tech Pioneers--this year's crop of 30 cutting-edge amazers, which will be announced this week by the World Economic Forum, prior to its annual meeting in Davos. They are working to combat AIDS, cancer, blindness and hunger. They're developing software that can keep track of anyone or anything, and new sources of power to wean the world from oil. Wish them luck.
On the rural outskirts of Hong Kong lies a site that was once a car-repair shop. Today it houses an experimental farm run by CK Life Sciences International. CK's chief technology officer, S.F. Pang, ambles around the lush, green grounds, extolling the virtues of one of the company's most successful products, NutriSmart fertilizer. NutriSmart is superefficient--a dose one-third the size of conventional chemical fertilizers provides the same crop yield--and because it's organic, it doesn't harm the environment. But most important, Pang insists, NutriSmart makes produce taste better. "Absolutely delicious," he purrs as he savors a handful of cherry tomatoes.
CK Life Sciences is part of a crop of this year's World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers, whose innovations are making the world a healthier place by tackling malnutrition, combating diseases like AIDS and cancer and preventing the leading mechanized cause of death, car crashes. Some of these pioneering firms--like Optobionics, a company based in Naperville, Ill., that is perfecting a microchip to help the blind see--have a decidedly cyborg bent. Others use advanced computer technology to stimulate humans into action, like the dashboard equipment from Seeing Machines that detects when drivers become drowsy and then jolts them awake. And companies like Gilead and Procognia are helping to find new drugs to stop the world's killer diseases. But what unites all these companies is the common desire to use the latest scientific and technological advances to improve our quality of life.
In 1990, when Alan Chow, founder of Optobionics, began developing the artificial retina that could help some blind people regain sight, bionic technology was mostly considered fantasy. "When we started, what we proposed was such a radically different approach to incurable eye disease that the idea was considered science fiction," says Chow, 50. But with 10 trial operations since 2000, Chow and Optobionics are inching closer to the regulatory nod that would usher their bionic device into the mainstream medical world.