It will be clear to the reader who has persevered thus far that the field is in a state of rapid growth, so speculation ia all the more risky. Nonetheless, it is hard to resist the idea that progress in other areas of single molecule studies will eventually combine with scanned probe methods. The most obvious development would be to join together the optical methods for single molecule detection (Weiss 1999) with SPM. For example, protein pulling experiments might be carried out on proteins labeled with fluorescent molecules chosen to signal distance between certain parts of the protein (the ‘FRET’ technique). In this way, the forced unfolding of a protein might be dissected at a submolecular level. If the background problem in live cells can be overcome, it would be of great interest to trigger signaling events mechanically, by, for example, placing a signaling protein onto its receptor on the cell surface. The subsequent chain of chemical events inside the cell could be followed with the appropriate fluorescent markers. The functional imaging methods involving antibodies would be much more powerful if carried out in conjunction with high resolution fluorescence microscopy. Conceivably one could fish for some chemically identified (but otherwise unknown) receptor with optical probes and then, once mechanically isolated, image it with the AFM. The possibilities continue to grow and are seemingly endless.