Grand challenges free researchers to explore what can be imagined

At times, it may seem as if technology is moving ahead at breakneck speed. But in reality, most technological and scientific innovation saunters forward in a stepwise fashion, building on past success and carefully hedged against serious risk. Grand challenges are different. By design, grand challenges are dreamed up to push the envelope, to break through barriers, and to ignore limits. Think of projects such as putting a man on the moon or mapping the human genome and you get the idea.

Grand challenges have become a favorite paradigm-shifting mechanism in many scientific and engineering disciplines ranging from mathematics and biology to psychology and astrophysics. Typically what they all have in common is a blend of imagination and wonder-a sense that something heretofore thought impossible might just be within reach.

These projects include creating virtual plants and animals accurate to the cell level, studying what it will be like to live with hundreds of billions and perhaps trillions of computers around us, and how we can integrate computer storage into our personal and community memories.

We continue here with some of the other grand challenges that the British are exploring.

From The Daily Yomiuri