In every field of human effort--from molecular biology to the color of music--the tools and rules are changing, generating startling innovations and then falling before them. Inspiration, arrogance, brilliance, stalk the land. So we present twenty-one innovators, creators, and thinkers whose work, in high fields and low, is transforming our civilization. Some you've heard of before, though probably not quite this way. Others you'll meet for the first time. There are a few who are so original we asked them to show what they do.
This soft-spoken twenty-nine-year-old commands a respect in cyberspace bordering on worship, his every move the subject of Silicon Valley scuttlebutt. Torvalds is the hacker wunderkind behind Linux, a collaboratively built computer-operating system that's turning the silicon world upside down. Linux is part of the open-source movement, a Net-connected band of hackers who think software code should be free to anyone who wants it. What has software Goliaths like Microsoft shaking in their wing tips is that the industry and Wall Street are taking notice. Red Hat, a company that makes a commercial version of Linux, stunned the market in August with an IPO that yielded a capitalization of almost $5 billion a day after its debut.
Not that much of it went to the free-spirited Torvalds, who is now working at Transmeta, the supersecretive start-up partially financed by Paul Allen. Some speculate that Torvalds is helping create a superchip that could unseat chip monolith Intel. The guy's a one-man trust buster. --GARETH BRANWYN
Technology is changing art as we know it. Maeda's digitally created designs are fiat-out beautiful, and playful onscreen pieces like The Reactive Square, which changes shape if you shout at it, and Time Paint, whose colors fly through space, puncture the notion that a work of art is timeless perfection on a canvas.
The big challenge in this field is for a digital artist not to be at the mercy of programmers, and vice versa. Maeda and his research assistants at MIT's Media Lab solve the problem by doing both, tickling, Maeda says, "the humanist side of computation. What I'm trying to do is help put soul into technology."
Maeda, thirty-two, believes the digital playground offers a way to go deeper into what we're really thinking and feeling, and the result may turn out to be art the likes of which we've never seen--or experienced--before. --ROBERT HUBER
She has arrived just in time for the baby boom's dotage. This thirty-eight-year-old biology professor at Johns Hopkins is leading us to a new understanding of the life span of cells--and the potential to control their destiny. Greider's pioneering research on telomeres, the DNA stretches at the tips of chromosomes, has given scientists a clearer picture of the mechanism that dictates the number of times a cell divides before it stops doing so--perhaps a prelude to its dying--or whether the cell keeps dividing ad infinitum, possibly starting a tumor.
This is heady stuff, and telomere research, sure enough, is yielding insight into the nature of mortality, at least on a cellular level. As for her work's implications, Greider says only that it is more likely to affect the treatment of cancer than the slowing down of aging. But as she points out, "there's a lot more science to do." --TERENCE MONMANEY
The limbic system is the part of the brain that controls hunger and thirst, but also emotional reactions and biological rhythms.
In Bill Joy's case, those functions hardly seem incongruous. Joy, forty-four, is a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, its chief scientist, and the inventor of many of the very best ideas in all of computerdom. All of them are aimed at making tasks easier, more natural. More beautiful. More democratic. That has meant Java, which enables users of all computers to share applications. And now it means Jini, which reaches beyond the desktop to permit the intercommunication of devices not anchored to the computer on your desk.
This inclusiveness is anathema to those who guard their works jealously, including the industry's notorious girl-with-the-most-cake. "The worst part of Microsoft is not their bad-boy monopoly behavior," Joy says. "The real problem is they build low-quality products, and that innovation is not a core value." Joy believes that the very nature of creative thinking is changing, and he believes the corporate paradigm is antiquated. "Innovation occurs elsewhere, because most of the bright people don't work for you. Small groups are more efficient because they can pursue ideas without a lot of encumbrance from history." And that allows what Joy values most: the sheer pleasure of having a working, feeling brain. --KEN KURSON
See, he didn't arrive at Gucci as some design star. No, Tom Ford was there in the back room, an imaginative kid from Texas with his own romantic ideas about what Gucci might be. When he got his chance, when he was given design control over the dying company in 1994--well, hello. By 1997, Gucci was the success story of the nineties. By earlier this year, it was the object of takeover fever. Company president Domenico De Sole maneuvered to retain control, attracted new financing, and began empire building himself, eyeing Fendi, Yves Saint Laurent, and Bulgari. Ford, thirty-eight, and De Sole are atop what may become the most influential luxury-goods enterprise in the world. The kid from Texas is now one of the arbiters of luxury, his ideas inevitably trickling down to influence the design of lifestyle at every level.
A political scientist might call him our leading "neorealist." Others just know him as the skunk at the garden party thrown by the American foreign-policy establishment to celebrate victory in the cold war. What he is becoming is the most influential foreign-policy adviser of his generation.
In Zakaria's view, spreading democracy should not be the first goal of U.-S. diplomacy. "America has an obligation to order the world," he says. "This, ultimately, will result in much more meaningful liberalization than going around hectoring despots to release political prisoners." He argues, for example, that order in Russia is preferable at this point to democracy. And that America should be less eager to pursue humanitarian interventions.
If Zakaria, thirty-five and the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, is half right, the world is only going to get more dangerous. And he will be one of the people who will get us out of trouble. --WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
She has come to wake you up. Armed with a powerful and dexterous voice, McDonald, twenty-nine, is on a crusade to make the moribund art form of the American musical matter again as music. In recent years, she has appeared in three hit Broadway shows--Carousel, Master Class, Ragtime--and won three Tonys. Suddenly, young composers are feeling alive again, and they all want to compose new music just for her, because revivals are nice, but people don't live in revival. Among the new work McDonald is generating is a show by thirty-seven-year-old Michael John LaChiusa, which will debut this fall. It is a new telling of the story of Medea called Marie Christine, this time set in New Orleans. McDonald spent time down there memorizing the place, putting the moss on the trees, because she is also a very good actress. This "huge, dark role" has some people saying, Bad move, girl. But there's never been a moment's hesitation for her, because "this is my life," she says, "and this is a sort of mission."
Before Martin Nowak, if you'd asked even a very smart doctor how many cells are killed by a virus in a day, or how many times a virus replicates itself in a week, his best, most precise answer would have been A lot.
Martin Nowak can give you a number. And then he can offer "precise treatment strategies." He is thirty-four years old, and he is a mathematical biologist--that is, he describes biological processes through mathematics. It is a field that didn't exist much before him, and it is a field that promises to change our understanding of the behavior of life on earth.
His engagement in it was sort of an accident. In 1988, Nowak sat through a lecture on HIV at the University of Vienna, where he was finishing his doctorate in biochemistry. As he listened, he thought, "Guessing is not good enough. Biology alone can't provide a picture of the dynamic interactions of entire populations of viruses. Mathematics is the answer." The next year, Nowak began work on his first math model of the virus. And this model revolutionized the way the world thinks about HIV and other viruses.
He continues his groundbreaking research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is now working on a better understanding of the evolution of language and of genetic systems. When you're inventing a new science, of course, you have nothing to compare your work to. "I'm always asking, Am I doing this right?" Nowak says, his eyes crinkling. "But mathematics is a very honest language."
His work on everybody's second-favorite organ, to paraphrase Woody Allen, is so startling you needn't be a scientist to appreciate its implications. Few ideas in biology have been more fixed than the doctrine that people are born with a finite number of brain cells and go downhill from there, neuronwise, all the way to senility. But last year, Gage and his collaborators showed that the adult (and even the elderly) brain can generate new nerve cells, a discovery that foreshadows the day when neurologists will repair injuries and diseases of the brain and spinal cord by tapping the nervous system's unrealized potential to replenish itself.
Gage, a forty-nine-year-old neurobiologist at the Salk Institute and the University of California at San Diego, says the finding is cause for optimism. For one thing, it suggests future therapies for ailments such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. For another, it transforms our sense of who we are. Under the old view of the brain, we recklessly squandered the cells we inherited at birth; under Gage's revisionist view, we might hold off dissipation with fresh reinforcements. Just don't tell that to the teenagers.
Even more profound than the prospect of reversing neurodegenerative disease, Gage suggests, is what the next wave of research will mean to our sense of ourselves. "The actual structure of our brain can be modified by our experiences," he says. "It turns out we have more control over our biology than we thought." --TERENCE MONMANEY
In the Valley, they fear and respect Bezos almost as much as they do Bill Gates. During the last year, he's expanded Amazon.com from a mere virtual bookstore into a cyber-bazaar by adding a drugstore, a toy store, an electronics shop, on-line auctioning, and a digital greeting-card service. He controls sites like Internet Movie Database, LiveBid.com, Pets.com, and a number of other successful on-line ventures. His customer base dwarfs eBay's, and his distribution system is peerless. As on-line entrepreneurs scramble to find or become the next cyber titan, Bezos wields the massive resources of Amazon with a combination of Steve Jobs's missionary zeal ("Work hard, have fun, and make history" is an Amazon motto) and Gates's Machiavellian instincts (if he can't beat 'em, he buys 'em). It remains to be seen how long Bezos, thirty-five, can stay ahead of the tidal wave of competition he's inspired or continue to convince Wall Street that short-term profits are less meaningful than continued development of an infrastructure vast enough to accommodate Amazon's potential earnings. So who's the next Jeff Bezos? More than likely, you're looking at him. --GARETH BRANWYN
If almost any doctor in the world said he'd find a cure for cancer in a few years, you'd laugh. But if Keith Black said it, you'd get chills. Black is forty-two and heads the neurosurgical institute at Cedars-Sinai in L.-A. He is a brain surgeon. He's very, very good: Since he started cutting twelve years ago, brain tumors that were once inoperable are now removed every day--by Black, of course, 250 times a year, with hands that cannot move and cannot miss. What's remarkable is that Black is also among the world's leading cancer researchers. Cancer is his enemy and his muse. Since last year, he's been conducting clinical trials on a way to stimulate the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells spontaneously--in the brain, in the breast, in the lymph nodes, on the skin--which could lead to a cancer vaccine. In November, he'll present preliminary findings. If his research holds up, Black sees doctors putting away their scalpels for good. "In ten or fifteen years, the whole idea of surgery will seem primitive."