Future R&D Environments
A Report for the
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Committee on Future Environments for the
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences
National Research Council
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COMMITTEE ON FUTURE ENVIRONMENTS FOR THE
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY
KENNETH H. KELLER, University of Minnesota, Chair
MILTON CHANG, iNCUBiC, LLC
WILLIAM E. COYNE, 3M Corporation
JAMES W. DALLY, University of Maryland, College Park
CHARLES P. DeLISI, Boston University
C. WILLIAM GEAR, NEC Research Institute, Inc.
ROY LEVIN, Microsoft Corporation
RICHARD L. POPP, Stanford University School of Medicine
NATHAN ROSENBERG, Stanford University
THOMAS A. SAPONAS, Agilent Technologies
Staff
NORMAN METZGER, Study Director
MICHAEL MCGEARY, Consultant (Acting Study Director, November 20,
2001–March 5, 2002)
STEPHEN A. MERRILL, Executive Director, Board on Science, Technology,
and Economic Policy
MARIA P. JONES, Senior Project Assistant
v
DIVISION ON ENGINEERING AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES
WILLIAM A. WULF, National Academy of Engineering, Chair
WILLIAM F. BALLHAUS, JR., The Aerospace Corporation
PETER M. BANKS, XR Ventures, LLC
SHIRLEY CHIANG, University of California at Davis
MARSHALL H. COHEN, California Institute of Technology
INGRID DAUBECHIES, Princeton University
SAMUEL H. FULLER, Analog Devices, Inc.
PAUL H. GILBERT, Parsons Brinckerhoff International, Inc.
WESLEY T. HUNTRESS, JR., Carnegie Institution

working with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements, and stan-
dards.” Against this, the National Research Council was asked to set out a range
of possible directions that science and its technological applications may take,
influenced by forces and trends in the economy and in industrial management and
strength, and, of course, not least by current frontiers in science and technology.
NIST did not ask the National Research Council to provide specific predictions
or projections. Nor did it request guidance on how NIST management might
translate possible future directions identified by the committee into specific pro-
grams and organization.
viii PREFACE
Accordingly, the Committee on Future Environments for the National Insti-
tute of Standards and Technology sought neither to predict nor to project, but
rather to set out a range of possible futures for the direction of science and tech-
nology. It approached the task in several complementary ways. First, it broke the
task into examining “push,” “ pull,” and “contextual” factors. “Push” gathered
together the committee’s judgments on possible “futures” for a set of scientific
and technical fields, focusing on biology and medicine, materials, and informa-
tion technology. “Pull” focused on societal demand factors—the economic, so-
cial, environmental, and political needs and sensitivities that would promote or
inhibit research and development in certain areas of science and technology, as
well as innovations based on that R&D. Under contextual factors, the committee
considered a set of issues such as changes in the organization and support of
R&D in both the public and private sectors, educational goals of students and
methods of delivering education, and patterns of investment by the private sector,
all of which might be expected to change the process by which ideas move from
research to product. While obviously this classification of factors is somewhat
arbitrary, the committee nevertheless found it a powerful organizing principle for
its task.
Secondly, the committee commissioned several papers pertinent to its task.
These papers examined how other organizations had approached the challenge of

who handled with patience and good humor countless logistical and organiza-
tional details for the work of the committee. The committee is also grateful to
Michael Casassa and Paul Doremus of the NIST Program Office for their helpful
coordination of the committee’s work with NIST senior management. Finally,
the committee wishes to thank Karen Brown, the deputy director of NIST, for
setting before the National Research Council a challenging, at times provocative,
and always interesting task.
Kenneth H. Keller, Chair
Committee on Future Environments for the
National Institute of Standards and Technology

xi
Acknowledgement of Reviewers
This report has been reviewed in draft form by individuals chosen for their
diverse perspectives and technical expertise, in accordance with procedures ap-
proved by the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Report Review Committee.
The purpose of this independent review is to provide candid and critical com-
ments that will assist the institution in making its published report as sound as
possible and to ensure that the report meets institutional standards for objectivity,
evidence, and responsiveness to the study charge. The review comments and
draft manuscript remain confidential to protect the integrity of the deliberative
process. We wish to thank the following individuals for their review of this
report:
Deborah Boehm-Davis, George Mason University,
George Bugliarello, Polytechnic University,
Matthew Ganz, Navigator Technologies Ventures,
John Hopcroft, Cornell University,
Robert Langer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
David J. Lipman, National Institutes of Health,
W. James Nelson, Stanford University,

Fundamental Drivers, 27
System Issues, 28
Ergonomic Issues, 28
New Drivers, 30
Information Technology and Medicine, 31
3 CONTEXTUAL FACTORS 33
Evolution of the U.S. Innovation System, 33
Organization of Research, 36
People, 41
Patterns of Investment, 43
Public Policy Issues, 45
4 PULL FACTORS 49
International Challenges, 50
Antiterrorism, 50
Globalization, 51
Biological Science and Engineering, 52
Computer and Information Science and Technology, 54
Environmental Issues, 57
International Security and the Global Economy, 59
5 CONCLUSIONS 63
APPENDIXES
A Biographical Sketches of Committee Members 71
B Workshop Agenda 75
C Workshop Participants 77
D Workshop Summary 80
E Recent Reports on Future Trends in Science and Technology 100
Michael McGeary
F Trends in the Economy and Industrial Strength 129
Kevin Finneran
G Innovation’s Quickenng Pace: Summary and Extrapolation of 143

gies—for example, the impact of information technologies on privacy and the
issues introduced by biotechnology and genetically modified organisms—are in-
creasing.
Of course, the future of S&T and its applications is difficult to predict, and
transformative breakthroughs that make the biggest difference are the hardest to
anticipate. If this study had been conducted in 1991 instead of 2001, for example,
2 FUTURE R&D ENVIRONMENTS
who would have predicted the invention of the World Wide Web and its impact
on the development of the Internet? (Who before September 2001 would have
predicted the impact of terrorism on the homeland of the United States and on the
substantial increase in support for antiterrorism research and technology?) Ac-
cordingly, the committee was not asked to predict specific future outcomes or
recommend what NIST should do. The report, therefore, presents a range of
possible trends and factors in S&T, industry, the economy, and society that NIST
should keep in mind in its future planning.
The committee proceeded by holding a 3-day workshop, commissioning re-
view papers on relevant topics, and meeting several times to develop this report.
Appendixes B, C, and D contain the workshop agenda, the list of participants, and
a summary of the proceedings. The commissioned papers are in Appendixes E
through I. The 3-day workshop, which took place from July 20 to July 22, 2001,
was attended by S&T leaders from a variety of fields (especially from biological,
materials, and computer and information science and engineering) and sectors
(industry, universities and other nonprofits, and government).
The workshop and this report were organized around three sets of factors
expected to shape future trends in science and technology: “push,” “pull,” and
“contextual” factors.
PUSH FACTORS
Push factors are advances occurring or likely to occur in S&T itself. The
workshop and the committee focused on three areas in particular—biological
science and engineering, materials science and technology, and computer and

as catalysts for fuel cells or high-bandwidth fiber-optic cables. Finally, new non-
metallic electronic materials will be developed at a rapid rate, including ceramic,
organic, and hybrid materials.
In computer and information science and technology, it is likely that compu-
tational speed and communication bandwidth will continue to improve at least as
fast as predicted by Moore’s law, limited more by economic considerations than
by physics. This may stimulate and, indeed, require greater attention to the soft-
ware development and human-interface issues that are likely to be the bottlenecks
in actually utilizing increasing hardware capabilities. What seems clear is that
advances in computer and information science and technology will affect the
relations among existing technologies, such as cable, telephony, and wireless
communications, expanding the potential of each of them, blurring their differ-
ences, and requiring a broad rethinking of how they are used and regulated by
society.
CONTEXTUAL FACTORS
Organizational, economic, and legal and regulatory issues also strongly af-
fect the S&T enterprise—the patterns of public and private investment, where
research is done and by whom, how effective the educational system is, and in
what kinds of settings innovation is most likely to occur. These contextual fac-
tors are particularly important in understanding where and how public policy can
most effectively influence the pace and direction of S&T.
With respect to the research establishment, the next several years are likely
to see a continuation of the trend to downsizing or eliminating central research
laboratories in large corporations. Outsourcing of development by large corpora-
tions and entrepreneurial activity will lead to both an increasing reliance on re-
search within start-up companies and an increase in the number and kinds of
cooperative relationships between universities and industry.
Reliance on universities for basic research will continue, but it will be in-
creasingly necessary for that research to be approached in a multidisciplinary
fashion, which will represent a challenge to universities, traditionally organized

undoubtedly influence the direction of research and development. Technologies
will be encouraged—even demanded—that help us to deter, detect, counter, and/
or recover from biological and chemical weapons and to combat the networks
that support and use them. There will also be a heightened sensitivity to the dual-
use nature of many technologies, and the desire to prevent misuse of these tech-
nologies will affect every stage of development and adoption. Technology trans-
fer and globalization are likely to be subject to particular scrutiny.
Concerns about the environment appear likely to continue to spur innovation
in energy production, materials development, and environmental monitoring and
modeling. However, those same concerns may inhibit applications of genetically
modified organisms in the food and agriculture sectors.
Both computer and information science and technology and biological sci-
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 5
ence and engineering will be strongly influenced by pull factors because of their
significant impact on social structures and culture and personal values. With
respect to information technology, tensions involving such issues as privacy, por-
nography, and free speech are already evident and are made more difficult by the
global nature of the Internet and the cultural and political differences among na-
tion-states. New developments in the biological sciences that make possible ge-
netic alteration, cloning, and stem-cell-initiated organ development raise issues
of personal and religious values for many people and lead to strong political
pressures to regulate research activities and applications in these areas.
All of this suggests that pull factors will be increasingly important in the next
several years in determining the direction of technological innovation. Scientists
and government will be called upon more and more to communicate with the
public about these issues in order to promote a reasoned and informed dialogue
and an orderly decision-making process. Furthermore, there will be an increasing
need for the educational system to bring nonscientists to a level of understanding
appropriate to their involvement in making these societal choices.
❧

vation system (industry, academia, the nonprofit sector, and government) and
from the increased technical literacy of citizens.
7
1
Introduction
The Committee on Future Environments for the National Institute of Stan-
dards and Technology, in responding to its task, was again reminded of the enor-
mous breadth and complexity of the science and technology enterprise. The ad-
vances in science and technology that actually manifest themselves as changes in
our society—as new products or other innovations, as new capabilities, or as new
benefits and challenges—depend on a number of factors. Important among them
is what advances are occurring or are likely to occur in science and technology
itself—what the committee has called the “push” factors. But there are organiza-
tional and dynamic issues as well that strongly affect the research and develop-
ment enterprise—the patterns of public and private investment, where research is
done and by whom, how effective the educational system is, and in what kinds of
settings innovation is most likely to occur. These “contextual” factors are par-
ticularly important in understanding where and how public policy can most effec-
tively influence the pace and direction of science and technology.
Finally, it is necessary to take account of the “pull” factors, those that en-
courage S&T developments in certain directions and discourage, even proscribe,
their development in other directions. These factors include social and cultural
trends and values, growing environmental concern and sensitivity, economic and
political pressures arising from both domestic and international circumstances,
and issues related to globalization—from competition between developed nations
to the growing pressure to deal with the needs of developing countries and the
destabilization of the international system that comes about because of severe
economic disparities.
“Push” factors, “contextual” factors, and “pull” factors were considered sepa-
rately in the committee’s work and are presented separately in the following sec-

any time, but there is fairly broad agreement that major developments in the next
10 years are most likely to come from within or at the intersection of three broad
fields: biological science and engineering; materials science and technology; and
computer and information science and technology. Each is characterized by an
extremely rapid rate of change of knowledge; each has obvious and wide utility;
and each will benefit from advances in the others, so that the potential for synergy
among them is particularly great. For example,
• Sequencing the human genome would not have been possible without the
enormous improvements in computational capacity in the last few decades.
• Those computational advances would not have been possible without im-
provements in materials and materials processing techniques.
• What we have learned about interfacial phenomena (physicochemical be-
havior within a few molecular lengths of the boundary between two phases) in
biological systems is contributing to the development of new man-made materi-
als, which, in turn, have allowed us to grow functional biological tissues.
Therefore, in considering “push” factors, the committee has focused on these
three fields, identifying the subfields within each that seem particularly ripe for
major advances or breakthroughs in the next decade. To ensure that this division
into fields does not neglect the strong potential for synergy between the fields, the
committee’s discussions and the report pay particular and deliberate attention to
the ways in which progress in any one field will benefit from progress in the
others.
10 FUTURE R&D ENVIRONMENTS
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
Advances in molecular and cellular biology lead the list of changes in the
biological sciences if for no other reason than that they have opened up new
fields. But how the new understanding of molecular and cellular structures and
events is used in health care and agriculture, for example, depends upon other
advances as well. In health care, changes are afoot in diagnostics, drug design,
tissue and organ growth, and artificial organs, particularly those known as hybrid

tions. Entire industries have emerged, perhaps the most notable being the biochip
industry, whose diverse technological infrastructure encompasses imaging, mate-
rials, and a range of information and computational technologies. This section