There has been good progress in understanding the principles that determine how embryos develop, but the current situation is rather boring, as many papers merely provide details of the role of a few genes in a particular developmental process. In the next 50 years, as systems biology and computer models take over, the embryo will become fully 鈥渃omputable鈥�: given a fertilised egg, with the details of its genome and contents of its cytoplasm, it will be possible to predict the embryo鈥檚 entire development. From this, new general principles may emerge. It will be possible to understand the basis of developmental abnormalities and how they could be corrected. But the development of connections between nerve cells in the brain may still be out of reach.
Lewis Wolpert forecasts the future
As systems biology and computer models progress, the development of embryos will eventually become fully "computable"