Johns Hopkins UniversityEst. 1876
America’s First Research University
Credit: Dalbert B. Vilarino
By Ben Whitford
In his inaugural speech in February 1876, Johns Hopkins University’s first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, promised that “the name of our founder [will] live for more than two hundred years to come, and his gifts be immortal.” We’ve now made it three-quarters of the way to Gilman’s goal—and the world has changed enormously along the way.
Just one month after Gilman’s speech, Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. That spring, Thomas Edison opened the Menlo Park laboratory where he would develop the phonograph and electric lighting. Fifty years later, in the mid-1920s, Werner Heisenberg established the foundations of quantum mechanics, Edwin Hubble proved the existence of other galaxies, and Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. In 1976, while Johns Hopkins was celebrating its centennial, both the Apple I personal computer and the first Cray supercomputer were released.
At Hopkins, researchers created a model for the big bang theory in the 1940s and, a decade later, invented lifesaving CPR protocols now used by millions of healthcare workers. In the 1970s, scientists developed molecular “scissors” that opened frontiers in genetic engineering, built the first implantable pacemakers, and took the first color photographs of the Earth from space.
Explore the extraordinary legacy of Johns Hopkins University’s groundbreaking discoveries and milestones with a timeline spanning from 1876 to today
Gilman couldn’t have foreseen these innovations. But he knew that changes were coming and that Johns Hopkins would be part of that transformation. “Every epoch requires a fresh start,” he said. “We launch our bark upon the Patapsco, and send it forth to unknown seas.”
After 150 years, Hopkins faculty and students have explored frontiers of which Gilman could only have dreamed. But what mysteries and wonders will the next half-century bring? We asked the current generation of Johns Hopkins researchers to dream a little and imagine what their field might look like when the institution’s 200th anniversary rolls around.
When Disneyland unveiled its House of the Future attraction in the 1950s, visitors lined up to wander through the MIT-designed plastic shell and gawp at wonders—including a microwave and a wall-mounted TV—designed with young families in mind. Back then, just 8% of Americans were 65 or older, but today this group makes up nearly 20% of the population; by 2076, the proportion is expected to climb to over 27%. To manage that transition, we’ll need a new approach to domestic environments, says Najim Dehak, director of engineering in JHU’s Geriatrics Engineering hub. “Older adults have different needs and different wants,” he explains. “We need to design future houses that can let older adults live safer, longer, and healthier lives.”
On the Bayview campus, Dehak’s team is building a new generation of “houses of the future”: model apartments packed with sensors and AI tools to help older residents. Fifty years from now, Dehak predicts, people will stay independent far longer, using self-driving cars to run errands or meet friends. Arriving home, they won’t fiddle with keys; their homes will recognize them, log their safe return, and automatically open the door. Inside, sensors—from motion detectors to cameras scanning the contents of the fridge—will monitor each resident’s wellbeing, ensuring they eat well, stay hydrated, and keep active. If we aren’t taking care of ourselves, voice-operated artificial intelligence assistants—Dehak’s specialty— will encourage us to grab a snack, call a loved one, or pop on virtual reality goggles for immersive group activities.
“Perhaps we’ll have robot butlers bringing us drinks,” Dehak says. “But more importantly, we’ll have smarter, more connected homes, and that will make it easier to stay safe and healthy as we age.”
Physicians will use the flood of data from connected homes to keep tabs on aging patients and sound the alarm if anything goes wrong. Sensors could track a person’s speech, handwriting, gait, or eye movement to provide early warning of cognitive decline or ailments such as Parkinson’s disease, or help physicians monitor treatment plans and adjust medications. “We’ll be able to personalize your treatment based on continuous data from inside the home,” Dehak says.
Round-the-clock monitoring might sound unsettling, but people already wear devices to track their biometrics, Dehak notes. “Over time, people will grow even more accepting of this kind of thing,” he predicts. In the long run, entire neighborhoods might be equipped with sensors to monitor residents’ well-being. “That’s where the future is heading,” Dehak says.
Space exploration works on long time horizons because it takes years to plan and launch space probes, then years or decades more before they reach their destination. “Those of us who study faraway objects are always thinking far into the future,” explains planetary scientist Sarah Hörst. Hörst has spent the past decade planning NASA’s Dragonfly mission, scheduled to touch down on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, in 2034, and the DAVINCI probe, which is set to plummet through Venus’ atmosphere around the same time. “My life is going to suddenly become very complicated in the mid-2030s,” she laughs.
Each new probe builds on insights from previous missions, but the intervening period is determined by planetary alignment. Missions to Saturn, for instance, can be sent only about every 30 years, so by 2076 researchers will likely be digesting data from a hypothetical “Son of Dragonfly” mission in the mid-2060s and deciding what to focus on next. One thing’s for sure: Titan won’t have given up all its secrets by then. Researchers will still be exploring what its complex chemistry and weather reveal about the origins of life on Earth or the likelihood of finding life elsewhere.
“Those are the kinds of questions we’re aiming toward making progress on,” Hörst says.
In coming decades, other flagship probes could include the Europa Clipper, arriving at the Jovian moon in 2030; a mission to Uranus, arriving around mid-century; and the Enceladus Orbilander, which could reach the Saturnian moon in the 2050s. Many of Hörst’s biggest questions— such as whether there’s life in Europa’s buried oceans or what Venus’ surface is really like—will almost certainly take longer to answer, requiring major breakthroughs in robotics and materials science. “I personally would be surprised if we accessed Europa’s ocean or sent a rover to the surface of Venus by 2076,” she says.
Further afield, the study of exoplanets will yield new insights: While thousands of planets have been discovered, there’s an enormous amount still to learn. But it isn’t as simple as pointing a zoom lens at a distant planet and spotting E.T. waving back at us. Instead, Hörst says, insights are gleaned by poring over noisy datasets to puzzle out the chemicals present in distant atmospheres. “People are going to keep claiming to have detected life on this exoplanet or that exoplanet,” she says. “But to really prove that we’ve detected life is going to be much harder.”
The history of solar system exploration shows it’s hard to truly understand other planets without visiting them, Hörst explains. While efforts are underway to send humans back to the moon—and one day Mars, too—there’s currently no practical way to send either humans or robots to other stars. New orbital or ground-based telescopes, or even entirely new imaging technologies, might be needed as researchers continue the search for extraterrestrial life. “You’re definitely in it for the long game in this field,” Hörst says.
Image credit: Dalbert B. Vilarino
Today, virtually all solar panels are made from silicon, which is cheap, durable, abundant—and only capable, even in theory, of absorbing one third of the energy in any given sunbeam. In practice, most current photovoltaic panels convert barely one-quarter of incoming solar energy into electricity, limiting their usefulness and driving up the cost of clean energy.
By 2076, that could change dramatically, says Susanna Thon, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Using nanomanufacturing, layered semiconductors, and other innovative techniques—some of which Thon is testing in her lab—it will soon be possible to harvest energy from a wider range of high- and lowenergy photons, potentially tripling the efficiency of panels. “We have a bunch of strategies, so it’s a technical challenge now,” Thon says.
Thermodynamic factors make it impossible to go beyond 86% efficiency, but nudging PV panels toward that limit would reduce the cost of solar energy while allowing small, ultra-efficient panels to be installed everywhere from handheld devices to automobile rooftops. “If you could make it as cheap as today’s silicon technology—and there’s no fundamental reason why that shouldn’t be the case—it could have a huge impact,” Thon says.
Nanotech materials could give rise to transparent solar panels that could be installed in windows or on device screens. One of Thon’s own innovations—a kind of spray-on solar panel—could spritz PV capabilities directly onto batteries, creating self-charging energy storage. Orbital solar collectors, meanwhile, could beam cheap energy to Earth or power data centers in space, reducing AI’s terrestrial energy footprint.
Some industrial applications will require fossil fuels, Thon says. But beyond that, advanced solar energy could meet virtually all of humanity’s needs. “On long timescales, the demand for renewable energy will only grow,” she says. “And solar energy is the one renewable resource that could power our whole civilization.”
If Joshua T. Vogelstein—a polymath whose research spans biomedical engineering, computer science, mathematics, and neuroscience— had a time machine, he’d head to 2076 and ask family and friends their take on artificial intelligence.
“I’ll know we’ve made real progress when the general population—people who aren’t involved in creating AI—are no longer afraid of it,” he says.
Right now, Vogelstein says, we’re in an unsettling place: AI is evolving fast, but we don’t know where it’s heading. Some expect progress to snowball, leading to the “singularity”—a turning point in which machine intelligence leaves humans in the dust. Others believe computers will never achieve humanlike intelligence. “And there’s good support for both claims,” Vogelstein says.
Demystifying AI will require a fuller understanding of intelligence itself, Vogelstein argues. One of his own projects—a neuron-by-neuron map of the fruit fly brain—suggests a path forward: An equivalent map of the human brain, which Vogelstein expects we’ll have by 2076, might clarify the biological underpinnings of human intelligence and shed light on whether it can be truly replicated via computer simulation.
But biological insights alone won’t be enough, he adds. Instead, we’ll need to fuse interdisciplinary research spanning neuroscience, human and animal cognition, and neural networks into something akin to the Standard Model used by physicists. “I’d like to think that by 2076 there will be a unified set of theories to explain intelligence writ large,” Vogelstein says.
A richer understanding of intelligence might reveal both the potential and limits of AI. “It might turn out that AI is much dumber than we think,” Vogelstein says. After all, today’s frontier models have effectively read every book in existence but still make basic errors we wouldn’t tolerate in a well-educated human. “We’re shocked by how amazing AI is but find it hard to extrapolate out to how amazing it should be,” he says.
New insights into human and machine intelligence might ultimately pave the way for better guardrails to ensure AI benefits society as a whole. “We’ve figured out how to navigate powerful and dangerous things before,” Vogelstein says. “We need to do that with AI, too, and ensure it serves our collective well-being.”
Quantum mechanics has been around for a century but continues to challenge researchers, says physics professor Peter Armitage. The field’s core insight—that at the tiniest microscopic levels, the universe is choppy and pixelated, rather than smooth and continuous—quickly leads to mindbending conclusions, with quantum objects teleporting around, influencing one another instantaneously across vast distances, or existing simultaneously as both waves and particles.
The core equations governing quantum mechanics are now well-understood, but new technologies and theoretical advances mean the field’s practical implications are still being explored. “I don’t see any indication we’re at the bottom of this well,” Armitage says. “We’re so busy that it’s like drinking from the fire hose.”
Already, researchers are using quantum methods to peer into the subatomic world. To find the Higgs boson—the elusive “God particle” that gives objects their mass—scientists used a five-mile-wide particle accelerator to smash protons together with incredible force. Today, Johns Hopkins’ Dave DeMille builds tabletop quantum sensors—using lasers to nudge ultra-cold molecules into highly sensitive quantum states—that can explore energy levels 10 times as high as those found in even the largest accelerators. By 2040, researchers could be using similar methods to investigate the petaelectron volt scale—around 100 times as intense as the collisions that revealed the Higgs boson—in search of new particles and physical forces.
Because quantum sensors reveal even the tiniest vibrations, they could one day detect dark matter and dark energy, which are invisible to conventional sensors despite making up the vast majority of the universe, or even the particles theorized to underpin gravity itself.
New quantum materials could also enable resistance-free energy transmission, making classical computers far more efficient. That could open the door to hybrid systems, with some tasks completed using hyper-efficient classical computers and others implemented using powerful quantum computation.
But even as quantum technologies go mainstream, Armitage says, the deep strangeness of quantum mechanics will continue to charm and confound people. “It will still seem weird,” he says. “Fifty years from now, people like me will still be sitting down and going, ‘But how can it really be true?’ I don’t think that will ever go away.”
IIn the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, scientists shrink to microscopic size to explore the body and treat a patient’s blood clot. We won’t achieve that in the next half-century—but the next best thing, says biomolecular engineer David Gracias, would be intelligent micro-robots that could be swallowed like a pill, allowing them to examine and treat patients from within. “We can send probes into space but don’t have a system to navigate our own body. That’s the big challenge that motivates me,” he says.
Gracias has already developed starfish-like contraptions, each the size of a grain of sand, that pinch onto the intestinal lining to deliver medications more slowly and precisely. Next, Gracias hopes to develop swallowable robots that can take photos or video before selectively performing a biopsy on tissue, enabling noninvasive colonoscopies and ureteroscopies.
Gracias focuses on the gastrointestinal tract because it’s easier and safer, but one day similar technologies could be used in the bloodstream or the brain. “Definitely, people are going to be doing that, and Hopkins is the place to do it because we have such a history of revolutionary medical discoveries and interventions,” he says.
Meanwhile, Gracias is developing “cellular tattoos”—tags, like tiny QR codes made from pure gold, that can be embedded into living cells. The goal is to remotely track their biochemistry, providing an early warning system if anything goes wrong. “The human body has about 30 trillion cells,” he says. “Maybe in 50 years’ time we’ll be able to tag and track each cell in the body.”
By 2076, Gracias says, we could have a “digital twin” for our bodies, continually monitoring the health of our livers, lungs, and other organs, much as we track sleep or exercise. Combined with pill-size “surgeons,” that would mean a far higher standard of medical care—even for people without access to specialists. “Having safe, widely accessible interventions,” Gracias says, “will greatly improve outcomes not just for the few, but more generally in society.”
When you reach out and feel something—rough or smooth, wet or dry, hard or soft—you’re touching on a mystery that still baffles researchers, says Jeremy D. Brown, associate professor in mechanical engineering. “We still don’t fully understand how haptic sensing really works,” Brown says. “Over the next 50 years, I suspect, scientists will get better at understanding how the touch system orchestrates disparate stimuli to form a percept of the physical world.” That would unlock new ways for humans to interact with machinery and digital tools.
Early prosthetics were mostly cosmetic or used simple cables attached to the user’s body to control crude mechanical “hands.” Today’s most advanced prosthetics are much more sophisticated, with powered components and fully articulated fingers, but still lack the sensory feedback needed to enable users to complete delicate tasks. Adding onboard AI might pave way for the creation of intelligent prosthetics capable of adapting and reacting in real time. “If you’re holding a coffee cup and it starts to slip, the prosthetic might detect that and squeeze harder, even before you realize it’s slipping,” Brown explains. “We need this kind of shared control morphology to make these devices operate in ways we can intuitively understand.”
Better haptic technologies could also upgrade medical tools, allowing surgeons using laparoscopic robots to feel what’s happening deep inside the body and maneuver robots as dexterously as their own hands. “Having access to that sensory information naturally changes how you physically interact with tissue in a surgical environment,” Brown says.
Current haptic technologies physically interact with the user’s body—creating resistance when a surgeon pushes on a robotic scalpel, say, or vibrating to send signals to a prosthetics user. In the future, Brown says, we’ll grow more adept at feeding those signals directly into the nervous system, or even into the brain itself. Brown compares that to the sci-fi bestseller Ready Player One—given the blockbuster treatment by Steven Spielberg in 2018—in which VR and haptic tools combine to conjure up ultra-realistic immersive environments. “My hope is that we can get to Ready Player One in the next 50 years, with devices providing rich haptic feedback,” he says. “And then 50 years beyond that, we’ll be putting implants straight into the brain to give you all the sensations you want.”
Ben Whitford is a science and technology journalist based in Chicago.
Posted in Science+Technology, Voices+Opinion
Tagged aging, nasa, biomolecular engineering, physics and astronomy, artificial intelligence, aging in place, quantum physics, solar power

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