Where in the World is Science and Technology Going?
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Where in the World is Science and Technology Going? John P. McTague The following is an edited transcript of the plenary lecture presented by John P. McTague at the 1996 MRS Fall Meeting on December 2,1996 in Boston. Long before 1993, the journey from New York City to San Francisco, across the continent, and from New York City to London, across the sea, will be made between the sunrise and sunset of a summer day. The railway and the steamship will be as obsolete as the stagecoach. And it will be as common for the citizen to call for his dirigible balloon as it now is for his buggy or his boots. Electricity will be the motive power, and aluminium or some lighter metal will be the material of the aerial cars, which will navigate the abyss of the sky.
John J. Ingalls "Remarkable Changes in Everyday Life" (1893)
public policy, and law. Globalization challenges basic assumptions about how, why, and where S&T is done. Ultimately, it determines who does the S&T. In short, globalization demands enormous change by the world technical community. Why change? Why embrace globalization? I submit that it isn't a question of choice. The globalized world economy forces change on S&T, just as the same globalized economy forced change on financial markets and on business linkages. Wholesale changes are underway at industrial laboratories, which are most closely coupled to the global economy. Many of you know that corporate research labs experienced considerable recent downsizing and redirection. Some downsizing was due to cost and market pressures. It is hard to justify long-term research and development (R&D) when your organization may go out-of-business tomorrow. However, other downsizing and redirection came from globalization pressures—from the realization that existing R&D structures were poorly matched to future needs. Globalization forces are not restricted to industrial laboratories. Sooner or later, they have an impact on everybody. Five specific forces drive S&T globalization. First, with telecommunications, including the world wide web and video conferencing, in which people are intimately linked, technical information is broadly and freely distributed. The second is competitiveness in existing markets involving lower costs, higher quality, and faster time-to-market. Expansion into emerging markets in less-developed parts of the world is the third force. The fourth force is the imbalance of S&T personnel across national boundaries. Russia, for example, has a surplus of technically
There is a short answer to my title question: Science and technology—or S&T—is going global. The answer should come as no surprise to the audience. S&T information has always flowed freely across national borders—witness technical publications in every language from Albanian to Turkish. The flow of S&T personnel has been equally impressive. The list includes not only emigre scientists—the most notable being Albert Einstein—but also emigre technologists such as Charles Steinmetz, Alexander Graham Bell, Giuseppe Marconi, Nikola Tesla, Peter Deb
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