Societal Issues in Materials Science and Technology
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Societal Issues in
Materials Science and Technology Morris Cohen The following is an edited transcription of the David Turnbull Lecture given by Morris Cohen at the 1994 MRS Spring Meeting. Cohen is Institute Professor Emeritus, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I am extremely grateful for this occasion to honor Professor David Turnbull, whom I admire very much and who has contributed so elegantly to advance materials science. His many achievements have been acclaimed by the most eminent scholarly awards. David Turnbull was among the first to appreciate and teach the multidisciplinarity of materials science. In fact, he has termed it a superdiscipline covering "the characterization, understanding, and control of the structure of matter at the ultramolecular level and the relating of this structure to properties."^ My lecture builds on this concept of materials science but broadens this branch of knowledge and activity to include materials engineering, thereby connecting with the technologies through which materials help serve societal needs and national goals.
I am going to use this special opportunity to reflect in a rather general way on the held of materials science—its place in the scheme of things, its changing nature, and its novel role in national and societal issues. All this is embedded in the ongoing debate on the interdependence between science and technology and their relationship to national well-being, often translated to mean industrial and economic performance, quality of life and health care, environmental protection, and national security. Clearly, the materials community must have some part to play in various aspects of the country's prosperity and standard of living, and that raises serious questions as to what a technical association such as the Materials Research Society might choose to do about it, if anything. These complex matters are particularly critical at the present time when science and technology are coming under increasing public and governmental scrutiny—even
pressure—to better serve the needs and the values of the nation. Materials as a Basic Resource of Society
One might first ask why materials are important enough to demand attention in this societal context. To start with, materials rank among the most basic resources of society, even of civilizations through the ages (see Table I).
Table I: Some Basic Resources of Humankind. Air, water, and food Living space Materials Energy Manpower Knowledge
Materials have been an intimate factor in human existence ever since the beginning of recorded history. In fact, materials are so ubiquitous that the public is only vaguely aware of their nature and hardly realizes that materials constitute a special kind of physical matter, namely, the substances which can be employed for making things. This is an apt notion of what materials are because it leads directly to a
Material Matters is a forum for expressing personal points of view on issues of interest to the materials commu
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