Where are they now...

Kathy Adams accomplished much during her 27-year federal career at the Social Security Administration and the Health Care Financing Administration, now the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But she is remembered best for her leadership of the federal effort to get systems ready for the new millennium.As SSA's assistant deputy commissioner for systems, she directed a program to ensure that the nation's retirees and disabled people would receive their Social Security payments without pause, even though most SSA software did not support four-digit dates.As SSA was becoming the first major agency to achieve Y2K compliance, Adams took on the leadership of the CIO Council's Year 2000 Committee and shared her agency's know-how with others.After retiring from government in 1999, Adams became vice president and director of health systems for SRA International Inc. of Fairfax, Va., an IT services company that primarily serves the federal government. Her customers include the Defense and Health and Human Services departments.Adams' thoughts: 'As I think back over the trends of the last 20 years, one of the most significant has been the use of technology to improve the delivery of government services. There have been continuous initiatives over the last 20 years to reduce the size of the federal work force.'At the same time reductions were occurring across government, workloads in many agencies were growing, and increased emphasis was placed on improving service to the citizen. This put tremendous pressure on government agencies to think of new ways to accomplish their missions and deliver services. Most agencies made significant investments in technology to make workers more productive and give them the tools and access to information they needed to be more responsive to their customers.'I believe the result is that today the federal government provides better services to more people than it ever has in the past. This trend is continuing as agencies exploit the capabilities of the Internet to take service delivery to the next level and focus on citizen-centric delivery of services.'Given this pervasiveness of technology and the government's increased reliance on IT to do its job, technology came to be viewed as an important asset. The Clinger-Cohen legislation addressed deficiencies in the management of IT throughout government and established the framework for planning, acquiring and managing IT investments. Clinger-Cohen has had a major impact on how the government manages and leverages IT investments to maximize its return on those investments.'XXXSPLITXXX-Paul Brubaker is one of the rare individuals who have held senior positions on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon and in the IT industry. As a top staff member of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, he was a principal author of the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996, which governs acquisition and use of federal IT. He also helped shape the Federal Acquisition Reform Act, Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, the Government Performance and Results Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act.He was deputy CIO and deputy assistant secretary of Defense for command, control, communications and intelligence in the late 1990s before joining Commerce One as president of its e-government solutions unit. That business became a new company named Aquilent Corp. in Laurel, Md., early this year after a management buyout led by Brubaker. Earlier, he had worked for Litton PRC and Federal Data Corp.Brubaker's thoughts: 'You might expect me to say that the Information Technology Management Reform Act [known as the Clinger-Cohen Act] was the most significant development over the last 20 years, but I don't really believe that to be the case. Clinger-Cohen, or something similar, was probably inevitable and served only as a catalyst to generate the kind of meaningful action we are now seeing in government.'It gave us a language and some tools which are only just now being used to ensure that government focuses not on the bits and bytes of technology but on really applying technology to solve business problems and that can be used to achieve measurable improvements in performance.'The Clinger-Cohen Act was a result of a confluence of ideas and people who came to Washington at the same time to solve problems. These dedicated people were either too naive or too driven to fail to effect significant and meaningful change. Folks like Steve Kelman, Dee Lee, John Koskinen, Tom Sisti, Ellen Brown, Mark Forman and the scores of people at the General Accounting Office and the agencies and industry made all the difference, and many of these people continue to influence the landscape.'It is the continued active presence of these people, and the growing number of others, who are joined by the common ideal that government can be agile, responsive and effective, that has been the most significant development in the past 20 years. Building upon this foundation will undoubtedly be the most significant trend for the next 20 years.'XXXSPLITXXX-Retired Lt. Gen. Al Edmonds spent 24 years in the Air Force, specializing in communications systems, but his last nine years were devoted to broader DOD organizations.After serving as director of command, control and communications for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he became the second director of the Defense Information Systems Agency. At DISA, he spearheaded development of the Defense Information Infrastructure, which includes the Defense Information Systems Network and the Global Command and Control System. It was on his watch that DISA turned off the old Worldwide Military Command and Control System, which had outlasted its technology.Today, Edmonds is president of U.S. government solutions for Electronic Data Systems Corp. The Texas global services company has more than 11,000 employees supporting federal, state and local governments nationwide.Edmonds' thoughts: 'When I got into the IT field years ago, I could not have imagined the explosive growth of the technology or the industry. IT is growing exponentially, spurred on by our desire for faster, more efficient and more secure systems.'This newfound capacity is itself creating rapid advances in other areas: medicine, transportation, education, security and privacy, manufacturing and government.'Looking forward, I see tremendous growth potential in the area of mobility'the merging of communications and information technologies. The greatest advances are still to come in improved people care from health care to entitlements and command, control and intelligence systems for cyberwarfare.'The government will play a key role in this space for the foreseeable future because citizens will demand the services they see advertised by industry.'XXXSPLITXXX-Philip Kiviat was a leader of government IT back in the days when computing was known as ADP, for automated data processing, and agencies' computing know-how surpassed much of the private sector's. Kiviat's specialty was systems planning, capacity management and performance monitoring.He was the first technical director of the Federal Computer Performance Evaluation and Simulation Center, or FEDSIM. During 1978, Kiviat was a task group leader for President Carter's data processing reorganization project.His 'Kiviat Graphs' are still widely used in the computer hardware and software performance field, as well as in other disciplines, to portray patterns and distinguish modes of behavior. Kiviat also wrote two books on simulation programming languages'SIMSCRIPT II and GASP'and numerous technical papers.He has been a consultant to the General Accounting Office and a member of the National Research Council panel for the assessment of the programs of the Computer Systems Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as a leader of industry organizations such as the Industry Advisory Council and the Association for Computing Machinery.After leaving government, he worked for several IT companies including Sterling Software, KnowledgeWare Inc., and ICF Information Technology Inc. Today he remains active as president of the Kiviat Group, a Potomac, Md., firm that advises IT companies and the government.Kiviat's thoughts: 'The legislative and regulatory changes of the 1990s that are known as procurement reform made a qualitative difference in the way federal IT business is conducted. These reforms materially improved the government's ability to acquire the goods and services it needs, when it needs them, at fair and reasonable prices. And they changed the way companies do business with one another and how they present themselves to the government.'The approach has evolved from, 'buy specified items at the lowest cost' to 'buy specified items that provide the best value' to 'sell me your choice of products and services that will solve my stated problem at a fair price' to 'this is my objective; tell me and sell me an affordable way to get there.''We have seen a complete shift in the way the government thinks about its role as a user of IT and the way in which it uses industry to make it an efficient and effective IT user in the most holistic sense.'As for current trends that will make a difference in years to come, two trends have overarching significance. First, the Office of Management and Budget is finally stepping up to its management role and taking a leadership position in getting departments and agencies to think of and deal with themselves as enterprises, especially with respect to infrastructure and security.'Second, managed-services contracting is emerging as a way of constructively drawing on industry strengths'talent and resources'and focusing government attention on mission issues and accomplishments, rather than on the prescriptive management of how IT work is done.'XXXSPLITXXX-When Belkis Leong-Hong retired from DOD in 1999, she was its highest-ranking Asian-American career employee. A mathematician and computer scientist, she spent almost 30 years in government, and retired as deputy assistant secretary of Defense for command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) planning and resources.She is best known for her effort to standardize data across the department, but she also worked on business process re-engineering, corporate information management, software quality improvement and many other initiatives. Besides the Office of the Secretary of Defense, she worked at DISA and the Defense Security Service.Today she is president of Knowledge Advantage Inc., a small, woman-owned company in Gaithersburg, Md. The company specializes in strategic business planning, knowledge management solutions, IT work force issues and Defense program requirements and analysis.Leong-Hong's thoughts: 'Two things are having an sizable impact on the way we're doing business today. First is the advent of handheld and wireless computing. You can't go anywhere without a Palm or comparable device. These computers have expanded our access to critical information, no matter where you are.'Years ago, I used to say that I could take a real vacation only if I took a cruise because the ships had limited communications with the United States. Today even cruise ships have Internet cafes! No matter where we are, we're connected. It's good, but it doesn't give workaholics any rest.'The second important development is less expensive and more powerful systems. Inexpensive servers are replacing mainframes, and both software and communications are readily available and able to handle major workloads. These developments make computing power available much more widely. That's good, although information security remains a huge challenge.'With the increasing availability and accessibility to computing power, we have a tremendous capacity for getting a lot of information'in fact, we are inundated with useful and not-so-useful information. The challenge is to be able to navigate through and access the right information as easily as possible. That is critical. Another challenge is the potential loss of critical knowledge to an organization as the work force shrinks.'Knowledge management has emerged as a discipline to address these challenges. Many software tools have emerged (or retooled themselves) to support this knowledge management discipline, including portals, powerful search engines, data mining, data warehousing, document management, customer relationship management, business activity monitoring, data fusion and e-everything.'Our industry is constantly poised to adopt, and adapt to, innovations that make our lives easier and better. The outlook for our industry is incredibly bright.'XXXSPLITXXX-When Lt. Col. Charles 'Chip' Mather retired from the Air Force in 1996, he was regarded as the government's foremost PC buyer. Not only had he obtained more than 500,000 PCs on the Desktop IV and Desktop V contracts on outstanding terms, but he had also developed innovative acquisition strategies for repricing and technology refreshment, among other elements.He enjoyed a 20-year Air Force career, focused on IT acquisitions totaling tens of billions of dollars. At retirement, Mather was chief of the IT Acquisition Division of the Air Force Standard Systems Group in Montgomery, Ala.After retiring, he and Eben Townes, another Air Force procurement leader, founded Acquisition Solutions Inc., a Chantilly, Va., consulting firm that helps federal agencies improve procurement processes and undertake acquisitions. It now has nearly 40 employees.Mather's thoughts: 'As a longtime acquisition reformer, I understand just how difficult it is to effect meaningful change in a large organization. While we have made much progress in improving the government's acquisition system, I am increasingly concerned that we are in danger of losing many of reform's important tools and flexibilities.'If we are to make good on the promise offered by acquisition reform, we must start demonstrating smarter and better. One opportunity is through implementation of performance-based acquisition.'Performance-based acquisition changes everything and holds great promise to align the goals and objectives of the agency with its supporting contractors. In its most basic terms, instead of contracting for compliance, you contract for results. When it is properly implemented, both parties have shared objectives.'From our experience to date, both the transformation in the government-contractor relationship and the results achieved implementing performance-based concepts have been remarkable.'I invite all who are interested in improving the acquisition process to look at the recent Transportation Security Administration acquisition of IT managed services. I believe this acquisition embodies the promise offered by acquisition reform.'I challenge all to keep the promise of acquisition reform going forward. For those of us who have been in the trenches, the requirement to issue an RFP or IFB for every action over $25,000 is not remembered as the good old days.'XXXSPLITXXX-Lynn McNulty held the entirely unofficial title of 'Mr. Civilian Government Information Security' during his seven years as associate director for computer security at NIST. That period, from 1988 to 1995, coincided with the virtually universal deployment of computers on federal desktops and ubiquitous networking of those computers. It all presented security problems undreamed of in the mainframe era.Toward the end of McNulty's NIST tenure, federal desktop systems were being connected to the Internet, raising the security stakes still further. Throughout these technology changes and controversy over issues such as encryption, he remained a voice of reason and practicality, often consulted by Congress and the White House.Today, he provides consulting services to public- and private-sector clients through his firm, McNulty and Associates of McLean, Va. His resume also includes a stint as director of government affairs for RSA Security from 1997 through 2000. Earlier in his government career he was the first director of information systems security at the State Department and worked in computer security at the Federal Aviation Administration.McNulty's thoughts: 'Over the last decade or more, we have made major advances in one area of security: problem recognition. For example, it would have been unimaginable around 1990 to have a cybersecurity adviser to the president, as we have today in Richard Clarke.'But are we doing a better job of protecting our information systems and the information they contain? In many cases, I don't think we are. The problem keeps developing and remains one step ahead of the solutions. We also suffer from resource shortages.'I think information security will be a profound issue for the next 20 years or more. Government and industry must continue to work together on security. The government understands the threats fairly well, but it cannot respond unilaterally because it relies on commercial hardware and software. I think the industry has to be more active in producing secure products than it has in the past. Security features are always coming in the next release, and they never get here.'One important development in the last 10 or 15 years is that information security has emerged as a separate and distinct career field. I was one of the first people to make a career out of information security, but today there are many people who devote their careers to this field. Many of them have more technical expertise than I had when I began this work, and that's good. In government, we need tech-savvy people who also understand policy and management issues.'New kinds of security threats have emerged over the last few months in the area of homeland security. We are not yet able to ensure continuity of public services at the state and local levels, as well as the federal level, and secure communications among all the many public-safety agencies is still a problem. The issue of wireless security will be a major challenge over the next decade.'XXXSPLITXXX-Retired Lt. Gen. Emmett Paige Jr. has had two notable Defense careers and is prospering in his third career, in the private sector.Paige, who joined the Army as a private in 1947, became a signals specialist. He moved up in the ranks rapidly and was commissioned an officer. He worked for the Army Communications R&D Command, the Electronics R&D Command and the old Defense Communications Agency, among other assignments. He was promoted to lieutenant general when he took command of the Army Information Systems Command at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., in 1984.His second military career came after he retired from the Army in 1988 and worked in the private sector. He was appointed by President Clinton as the assistant secretary of Defense for C3I and served from 1993 to 1997. Over his office door in the Pentagon he posted a sign, 'Thank goodness it's Monday.'Before and since his Pentagon post, he was the president and chief operating officer of OAO Corp., a systems integrator in Greenbelt, Md. When Lockheed Martin Corp. acquired OAO in 2001, Paige became vice president of Lockheed Martin's IT unit, responsible for the unit's Defense business. He says he's likely to retire from Lockheed Martin in the next couple of years, but he will continue to work as a consultant.Paige's thoughts: 'We've come a long way in the last 20 years. If any single thing has influenced where we're headed, it's probably the PC. It's hard to remember how far the technology has come in a relatively short time. And the speed of technological progress is accelerating.Every six to 12 months there's a rollover in speed, power and the size of components, as well as their price. Look at what it costs you today as opposed to what it cost two years ago. And we haven't even scratched the surface yet in exploiting the technology.'This readily available technology will help us and it will help other nations, including those that are our enemies. Anybody who wants to do us harm can do that today at very little cost'except for the brainpower. And we don't have a lock on brainpower. In our graduate schools, people who are not from America are earning more of the advanced degrees than Americans are.'When I worked in defense R&D programs, we were developing technology that clearly made a difference. There was no question that we led industry and everyone else. Today, government no longer spends a lot of money doing research. The commercial technology, especially the PC, will permit us to do things today we didn't dream of doing even 10 years ago.'XXXSPLITXXX-Rona Stillman made her mark as the chief scientist for computers and telecommunications in the General Accounting Office's Accounting and Information Management Division. There she was known for applying her high editorial and technical standards to GAO reports and for her insightful reports on the IRS' modernization program and other agencies' IT problems.Her 33 years of federal service included stints with the old Defense Communications Agency and National Bureau of Standards. In her first job, with the Air Force at the Air Development Center in Rome, N.Y., she sat for seven years at a desk next to her husband, Neil.Neil Stillman served as the de facto CIO in his post as deputy assistant secretary for information resources management at the Health and Human Services Department. He was a community leader, serving as president of the Federation of Government Information Processing Councils and playing an active role in the CIO Council and other federal IT organizations. Besides the Air Force, he also worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency during his 34-year career. He was known as an advocate of systems interoperability.Both Stillmans retired in 1999 and have not taken new jobs. Near their home in Rockville, Md., they play tennis and golf and have finished a major remodeling project. They hold many of the same opinions and sometimes finish each other's sentences. They are fiendish M&M eaters.The Stillmans' thoughts: Neil Stillman: 'Systems standardization has been the major government IT issue for the last 20 years, and it remains an issue. In the bureaucracy, each person wants to do his or her own thing.'The inability of radios operated by different public-safety agencies to communicate during the terrorist attack on New York in September 2001 was just one glaring example. How many times do we have to hear it? It makes no sense for each agency to have its own unique personnel system. But I'm expecting that some of these problems will go away in the next 20 years as people who know IT take over.'Rona Stillman: 'Neil is more optimistic than I am about solving this problem. Many of the decision-makers don't consider it in their career interest to use a standard solution. The government does not reward people for spending less and employing a smaller staff. It's basically irrational.'Neil: 'Many of the complexities of the federal IT environment are not really necessary. For example, when the FTS 2000 telecommunications service was being set up, I asked whether we could get a flat rate per employee'so much per person, regardless of actual usage. That's the kind of deal the cellular phone companies are offering now, but it wasn't in the cards then.'Rona: 'Software development is another area that needs more standardization and compliance with good methodologies. Software is doing the government's business, the work that people used to do.'Neil: 'I remember a talk Ruth Davis gave in 1986 when she left the Bureau of Standards. She said the government thinks it has unique requirements, but commercial software usually can satisfy 80 percent of its requirements. If you can achieve 80 percent of what you need, that's good enough, she said, and she was right.'How do we like retirement? We're reveling in not working. Government is a very frustrating environment. There's no decision that isn't colored by politics.'XXXSPLITXXX-When NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe appointed Paul A. Strassmann his special assistant for information management earlier this year, he noted that 'Paul has been a key contributor in shaping business and information technology systems.'Strassmann is an innovative thinker regarded by some as a gadfly and by others as the developer of important ideas about the relationship between business success and IT.Strassmann was a corporate CIO for General Foods, Kraft and Xerox before joining Defense, first as an adviser to the deputy secretary and then as director of Defense information in 1991. He spearheaded the Corporate Information Management program, which sought to impose an architectural discipline on the thousands of redundant and mismatched systems in DOD. After leaving the Pentagon in 1993, he returned to his consulting and writing work in Connecticut.Architecture will be his focus at NASA, where he recently became acting CIO. O'Keefe has asked him to develop an agencywide vision for IT and help get the agency s troubled financial systems modernization program on track.Strassmann's thoughts: 'One way of summarizing the last 20 years is to label them as an era of lost opportunities. As private-sector firms came to realize that IT could be one of their most potent weapons in economic contests'just look at Wal-Mart and FedEx'government computing just kept plodding along in pursuit of so-called efficiencies and effectiveness, sometimes regressing into just paperwork reduction.'None of the above should be seen as a denial that progress was made in getting the wheels of government to move faster and often better. Certainly the steadily rising IT budgets demonstrate that the government was steadily buying more computing power.'But, did we buy a widely acknowledged superiority, as seen from the taxpayers' point of view? I doubt it. Government computing has lost its elite ranking since the 1960s, relative to the private sector, going from a position of leadership to a position of straining to catch up with prompt services that consumers now expect to receive as a matter of everyday routine.'To make further progress we must examine some of the fundamental causes of being a laggard. There are many causes, but I locate them primarily in the denials of government agencies to deal with the resolution of governance, that is, intramural politics, conflicts prior to launching yet another computerization episode.'Governmental computerization efforts can be characterized as avoiding a confrontation with the reality that information technology projects are nothing more than a continuation of bureaucratic power struggles pursued by other and more expensive means.'Government computerization projects always try to fit information technologies into the framework of existing organizational structures, thus accomplishing little more than welding in the status quo by hard-to-change code. Here and there the existing workflow within the existing bureaucracy is tweaked to demonstrate marginal gains, but the results are only rarely visible as remarkable improvements.'Commercial firms seeking competitive superiority do not act like that. They reshape their organizational structures to take advantage of how to realign the relationships with suppliers, employees and customers in innovative ways. They always seek competitive advantages that a customer can recognize as a demonstration of excellence in delivery of attractive solutions.'Is there any hope that the lost opportunities can be regained? I think so. I am particularly encouraged by the e-government initiatives of the President's Management Agenda pursued by the current administration. This is the first time that reformation in how to manage information technologies has become one of the key objectives of OMB.'If as little as one-quarter of all new IT development funds can be shifted into one of the e-gov programs before the next change in administration, there is hope that what has been lost could commence to be regained.'XXXSPLITXXX-Bob Woods joined the government as a Navy engineering intern in 1968. He first gained a reputation for bold innovation as the IT chief of the Federal Aviation Administration from 1972 to 1987. There he launched two of the government's first major outsourcing programs, CORN for mainframe processing and OATS for desktop computing.Moving up to the Transportation Department, he ran its IT shop as a business operation that more than broke even.His next stop was the Veterans Affairs Department, where as deputy assistant secretary he worked on integrating stovepiped systems of veterans' records. While serving as the commissioner of the General Services Administration's Federal Technology Service from 1994 to 1997, he expanded federal telephone services while bringing down the cost to agencies, among other achievements.Today, Woods is president of the education services unit of Affiliated Computer Services Inc., a Dallas company specializing in business process outsourcing. He also is chairman of the Industry Advisory Council, an influential organization of companies that provide IT services and products to the government.Woods' thoughts: 'In many ways, our community has gotten a black eye from the recent collapses of telecom and dot-com companies. But I think, overall, we're doing a good job for our customers and for their mission-critical systems. When we started in this industry, we were trying to get more proficient in the technology. That was how we got ahead of the competition. Now we're beginning to ask, What good is this technology? What does it do for our business?'More and more, our customers are demanding business solutions, not just IT solutions. They don't want you to build them a system and then go away, leaving them holding the bag.'Parts of our industry haven't figured it out yet. We still have a lot of organizations that are building technology hobbyhorses whose value to their missions is uncertain. There's no excuse for building another payroll system or bill processing system, for example.'It's important to recognize that we're going through another evolution in the use of IT, one where the outcome is not technology but the end service or transaction. I believe business process innovations over the next few years will be a lot more important than the technological innovations.'XXXSPLITXXX-As chief of information and technology policy at OMB from 1985 to 1999, Bruce McConnell tackled tough issues such as encryption export policy, information security, IT procurement and management, and public access to government information.He also was a key leader in preparations for the year 2000 rollover, and during 1999 he established and directed the International Y2K Cooperation Center under United Nations and World Bank auspices. The center coordinated the efforts of more than 170 national governments and countless private businesses and organizations in a unique global human and electronic network that soundly defeated the Y2K bug.Today, McConnell is president of McConnell International, a global technology policy and management consulting firm in Washington that helps IT companies develop government business. McConnell is a member of the board of visitors of the University of Maryland's R.H. Smith School of Business and serves on the Policy Group on Network-Enabled Services and Government at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of numerous papers and articles on governance in the networked century.McConnell's thoughts: 'Today's increased attention to information security is long overdue. But security requires cooperation, and, therefore, two important caveats apply.'First, without trust between business and government, critical information about threats and vulnerabilities will not be available to the people who need it. Both parties must work hard at this.'Second, security must always be balanced with usability, access and other basic American values. For example, if information flow is unduly restricted for security reasons, markets will not operate efficiently, nor will citizens be able to exercise their responsibilities in a democracy. Likewise, if citizens perceive that 'big brother' is looking over their shoulders, or if business believes big government intends to exercise the heavy hand of regulation, the appetite for cooperation will vanish. In today's distributed environment, security requires everyone to work together.'XXXSPLITXXX-Retired Vice Adm. Jerry Tuttle's 47-year career has taken him from the skies over Vietnam, where he flew combat missions, to the top ranks of the Navy and its IT programs, and then to executive roles in several software and consulting companies.After enlisting in the Navy in 1955, he became a naval aviator and landed on aircraft carriers more than 1,000 times. Moving into the command, control, communications and intelligence area, he led the development of the Joint Operations Technical System.After a tour with the Joint Staff, he became the Navy's director of space and electronic warfare, spearheading the Copernicus infrastructure program and the Sonata information warfare architecture. He also served as the Navy's inspector general and the second-ranking officer of the Atlantic Fleet. His awards and medals are too numerous to list here.Tuttle retired in 1993 and worked successively for Oracle Corp.'s government unit, ManTech International Corp. and Savantage Financial Services Inc. This year, he founded his own consulting firm, JOT Enterprises of Fairfax, Va.Tuttle's thoughts: 'The computer has had a profound, positive effect on every aspect of our lives since Shockley invented the transistor. It is omnipresent, the Proteus of all machines, and has opened up entirely new vistas, many of which we as mere mortals could not imagine.'The computer has altered organizations, where and by whom work is done, improved productivity, and enables everybody to have access to a galactic global digital library. Everybody's experiences and knowledge become available to all, not just the intelligentsia as in the past.'We are on the cusp of being able to map and emulate the phenomenal parallel processing capabilities of our brain that will enable us to understand human behavior better and enhance our ability to assimilate knowledge. Computers enabled us to map the human genome, the chemistry that composes us, and will eventually permit us to know which stem cells to activate and their permutation to achieve the desired effects, for example, eliminate pain or cure diseases.'Ever-increasing processing power will be brought to bear in the relentless and endless pursuit of perfect knowledge for which to wage immaculate warfare. We are surrounded by fantastic opportunities brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems, as the crucible of the technology age churns out one astounding product after another and ushers in the even more exciting and marvelous Age of Biotech.'