Mike Wallace peeks into the future

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A cure for breast cancer? Vaccinations that protect against mental illness? A lifespan of 140 years?

In a new book entitled “The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today,” 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace asks 60 of the world’s biggest thinkers in areas of health and technology to take a stab at what life will hold for us and our progeny, 50 years from now. Among their conclusions:

--We will have our own DNA sequence available in an electronic medical record, accessible from anywhere in the world. (From geneticist Francis S. Collins, MD, of the Human Genome Project)

--We will have discovered how to prevent breast cancer and heart disease (from Nancy Brinker, founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and Louis Ignarro, co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize and professor of pharmacology at the UCLA School of Medicine).

--Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder will be discovered to be caused by a combination of infectious agents and predisposing genes (from schizophrenia researcher and psychiatrist Dr. E. Fuller Torrey).

--Our grandchildren had better start saving early, because they can expect to live about 140 years. But that long lifespan may come at a price. There could be a national genetics authority charged with regulating who is allowed to reproduce based on genotypes (from Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania).

The book hits stores April 15.

--Janet Cromley