Evolutionary nirvana is still very much on mankind's to-do list. We might be giving ourselves congratulatory backslaps with our wireless internet and microscopic mobile phones, but in the big scheme of things we know only three things: our planet is one of many; we're little more than hairless apes; and we consist of DNA.
The people who managed to make these discoveries achieved personal glory, their names etched into the annals of human history forever. In the 16th century, Copernicus changed the way we saw the universe; 300 years later, Darwin enabled us to connect with the animal world. Watson and Crick, in unravelling DNA, taught us how to decode life.
Of course, for every Watson and Crick there are a million others trying to sharpen the blade of human knowledge. The world is watching with interest the work of Dr John Xin, his assistant Walid Daoud and Professor Hu Jin-lian at Hong Kong Polytechnic University: three people who are pointing us towards a world without ironing-boards and washing machines.
Their revolution will be in textiles, thanks to nanotechnology - the appliance of molecular phenomena on a scale 1/80,000th the size of a single human hair. Using it, they've created intelligent self-cleaning and shape-memory materials.
Of course, places such as Polytechnic University represent the gleaming, cutting edge of human discovery; the combined comforts of sparkling laboratories and government funding. At the other end of the blade is an old, unwieldy wooden handle, where a legion of old-timers with wild imaginations attempt, every day, to achieve brilliance on their terms and out of their own pockets. Three hundred or so boffins make up the Hong Kong Invention Association (HKIA), whose work is anything but a lab-coated cruise to fame and riches - it's more like a punctured dinghy with a broken paddle sailing against a current of measly funding. Against the odds, however, this could be the year when their reputations reach supernova status.
'We currently have an invention that could change the world,' says 88-year-old chairman Cheung King-fung, who, despite his age, is still the go-to guy in town if you are an aspiring inventor. He works 13-hour days, cocooned in a tiny office squeezed into a corner of an old shopping mall on Middle Road in Tsim Sha Tsui. This is the cramped, chaotic headquarters of the HKIA, where you have to stoop under a ceiling that is too low and where at least four people are usually talking at once.
