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Trouble is, Stojkovic will discard the embryos just days after making them, and for many people that's morally unacceptable. Many religions maintain that life begins at conception and that throwing away embryos amounts to murder; "I have a clear conscience," says Stojkovic, who holds that life begins after 14 days, when the nervous system starts to form. Nonreligious groups like the London-based Human Genetics Alert warn that the techniques could be used to clone babies, something that Stojkovic opposes. "I believe in embryonic stem cells," he says. If he can come up with a cure for diabetes, a lot more people will believe along with him. — By Mark Halper


Reed Hastings Netflix | U.S.
The idea for Netflix, like many great eureka moments in business, came from a very mundane experience. It was 1997, and Reed Hastings was six weeks late in returning a copy of Apollo 13 to his local Blockbuster in San José, California. The late fee was $40, and the former computer scientist thought to himself, Never again. He came up with a simple solution — so blindingly simple, in fact, that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are still kicking themselves for not thinking of it first. Netflix customers keep a wish list of DVDs they want to see, in order of preference, on www.netflix.com. Netflix then mails out the selected films. The service costs $22 a month, for which customers get to keep out three movies at a time. When they're done with a DVD, they stick it back in the same prepaid envelope in which it arrived. As soon as the nearest Netflix hub receives it, staff send out the next one.

That's it: no late fees, no standing in line, no walking out of the store with a film you didn't really want to see. It's working for Netflix's 2 million U.S. subscribers, almost 1 million of whom signed up in the last year alone. In Northern California's Bay Area, Netflix's largest market, the company accounts for an astonishing 10% of all movie rentals. Launched in 1999, the Los Gatos,

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) California-based company posted its first profit last year ($6.5 million), while revenues grew by 78%. It's also inspired copycats abroad: Zip in Canada (www.zip.ca) and Lovefilm in Britain (www.lovefilm.com). Netflix skillfully exploits two defining consumer trends of the last decade: the ubiquity of the Internet and the rocket-fueled growth of DVD players. The first commercially available DVD players only hit the market in 1997; by the end of this year, two-thirds of U.S. homes will have one.

Hastings, 43, is modest about his firm. "I'm a funny kind of guy to be running a consumer company," he says, admitting he'd just as soon discuss artificial intelligence. He thinks he can win the battle with WalMart, which launched a copycat service in 2002, and Blockbuster, which plans to trial a similar rental program in the U.S. soon. Hastings has an advantage; like Amazon, Netflix relies on ratings by its members, who are asked to give everything they rent up to five stars. These ratings go into the system's algorithm and out come recommendations for movies you never knew you wanted to see — like Whale Rider, which was never a top 10 movie at the box office but topped Netflix's charts. Starting from scratch, Blockbuster et al are five years behind in their online recommendation systems.

Granted, Netflix for now is dependent on the DVD, which will presumably fade when paying to download films becomes widespread. That's Blockbuster's intended path, and Hastings himself is set to start a trial download service next year. But he doesn't expect imminent success. The technology and copyright management make it too daunting for most users, and who wants to watch movies on a PC anyway? "DVDs have got a good decade left in them," he says. For Netflix, chances are it will be a very good decade, indeed. — By Chris Taylor/Los Gatos


Scott McGregor Philips | Netherlands
Most technology executives are lucky to be part of one revolution; few would even dream of being involved in two. So envy 48-year-old Scott McGregor, who two decades ago led the development of the Windows operating system at Microsoft. Today, as chief executive of Philips Semiconductors, he is spearheading the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) movement, which aims to put electronic ID chips on everything from ketchup bottles to army tanks. The RFID chip, says McGregor, "is changing the way people do business and interact."

Sounds like hype, but it's true. RFID tags are tiny devices that transmit information about the objects on which they reside. Relatively unknown just a few years ago, RFID chips are potentially the greatest technology to hit retailing since the bar code, as giant retailers like Metro in Germany and Wal-Mart in the U.S. use them to track shipments and inventory. The U.S. Department of Defense has ordered suppliers to deploy them to help the military keep tabs on stocks of essentials, such as jeep parts, and Las Vegas casinos are snapping them into poker chips to tally bets. Little wonder that market-analysis firm AMR Research predicts a $20 billion RFID industry by 2013.