Beyond the horizon

During the past 150 years, biology has seen many revolutionary advances and the development of technologies that have sparked new questions and resulted in fresh insights. Advances in optics and lens‐making brought great improvements to light microscopy in the nineteenth century, which, in turn, enabled biologists to observe life at the cellular level. The resulting discovery of bacteria as disease‐causing agents spawned the field of microbiology and revolutionized medicine. The electron microscope, developed by physicists, is now mainly used by biologists to study the structures and processes that occur inside the cell, which has put cell biology at the forefront of research. At the macro‐level, the sequencing of whole genomes and the use of powerful computers and sophisticated algorithms now enable biologists to study life on a larger scale and have generated whole new fields of research, such as genomics and proteomics.But, in many ways, biology has stretched technology to its limits. Many scientists have access to equipment and databases that allows them to test ideas and produce a lot of information fairly quickly. This has produced a flood of …