Opinion

THE end of a decade is a pretty arbitrary event. But it's as good a moment as any to take stock of how science has fared over the past 10 years and to peer into the future.

Despite fin-de-siècle predictions that science had exhausted its capacity to surprise, the noughties kept on delivering marvels. Developments in stem cells, the internet, flu, exoplanets and dozens of other areas of science and technology kept New Scientist's writers and readers busy.

The decade was perhaps best defined by the ups and downs of Big Science. With the advent of the new millennium, hopes were high that huge undertakings - notably the Human Genome Project and the Large Hadron Collider - would deliver revolutionary advances in our understanding of ourselves and the cosmos we inhabit. But science rarely delivers what scientists set out to find, and so it turned out.

The expectation was that the HGP would deliver "the book of humanity", in the shape of 100,000 or so genes that would reveal how our bodies work and the causes of complex conditions such as asthma and autism. In fact, the book contains far fewer words than anticipated and is much more difficult to read - but the HGP still opened the door to huge advances in our understanding of human genetics.

It also hammered home just how complex the workings of genes can be, and the need to understand gene expression, RNA and epigenetics as well as the genome itself. While the HGP proved a disappointment to those who expected it to instantly usher in a golden age of personalised medicine, it might yet deliver just that. And projects to sequence the genomes of other organisms - including our cousins, the Neanderthals - are delivering new insights into our origins and what makes us human.

Expectations for the LHC were, if anything, even grander. It would deliver answers to enduring questions such as where mass comes from, how the universe's building blocks are arranged, and the identity of the mysterious dark matter that we think makes up 23 per cent of the universe. In the event, of course, the project was plagued by delays, verging on the farcical when it had to be shut down for repairs just days after finally firing up. Yet despite these setbacks, expect the LHC to be one of the success stories of the next decade.

The crowning glory of science in the 2000s was another massive project, though one not endowed with a formal name. There was no dedicated "International Climate Project", yet thanks to work by legions of scientists, backed by an investment of billions of dollars, the decade has yielded a mass of research revealing the behaviour of the Earth's climate in unprecedented detail. The result is an overwhelming body of evidence that human activities are warming the planet. For most people and politicians, climate change started the decade as a distant, abstract threat. It is now recognised as an immediate, existential one. Never before has scientific evidence played such a central role in the most pressing geopolitical issue of the day.

There are questions left to answer, such as the extent of future warming and when climate tipping points will be reached. And of course the world faces the massive political challenge of taking action on what the science is telling us. There is little doubt that climate change and related environmental problems will be defining issues of the next decade too.

Though angst about the future of our planet is understandable, there is good reason for confidence that the problems we face can be solved. Science and technology can - and must - help us build a more sustainable relationship with nature. Making that come to pass in the next 10 years is perhaps the most important goal we can aspire to.

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