Scientists at the World Economic Forum here have little doubt that nanotechnology, genomics and robotics are going to be the hot technology growth areas in the years to come, but many are also unnerved about its impact on society. The reason is last year's mapping of human genome, the genetic "recipe book" which scientists have now broken down into a digital code of 3.1 billion chemical bases.

"Code in a computer, rather than tissue under a microscope, had dramatically changed the way we should look at biology," said Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, one of the world's leading computer makers. "It is symbolic that the code of the human genome has been broken in the year 2000.

It has made biology an information science," he said. "The 21st century is going to be the real information age, and I don't mean the Internet," Mr Joy added.

He predicted the value these new technologies will create is going to dwarf the Internet era, once dubbed by venture capitalist John Doerr as the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of mankind. "The upside is enormous," Mr Joy said. "Over the cause of the next century it can create $1,000 trillion of new wealth."

The mapping of the genome has thrown up a myriad of new possibilities in tackling the root cause of diseases, notably cancer, and genetic scientists believe engineering the genes of individuals will soon be within reach.

George Church, director of the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School, said clinicians may soon be able to sequence the genomes of individuals, launching the age or truly personalised medicine.

"It's not out of the question that we could have a technology for sequencing our individual genomes in the not too distant future," he said. But there are ethical dilemmas too. Confronted with the question of whether they would want to map out the genome of their unborn and eliminate "faulty" genes, a group of politicians, scientists, computer engineers and entrepreneurs in the fringes of the meeting were split 50:50.

But Jeremy Rifkin, president of the US-based Foundation on Economic Trends, had no doubt all of them would jump on the opportunity when it presented itself. "I guarantee you that everyone will want that map...A child will become the ultimate shopping experience in post modern life," he said.

Richard Klausner, director of the US National Cancer Institute, said there was a huge potential for an improvement in treatment with the first fruits of genomic research coming in new ways to differentiate between dozens of different cancers.

(Reuters)