The next 75 years: Symposium sparks upgrade to US policy model for R&D
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The next 75 years: Symposium sparks upgrade to US policy model for R&D nationalacademies.org/EndlessFrontier
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t the beginning of her talk at the symposium marking the 75th anniversary of Vannevar Bush’s report that shaped science policy in the United States, France Córdova, then director of the US National Science Foundation (NSF), presented a statuette of Vannevar Bush, referring to it as the “Oscar” for science. The statuette is based on a replica of a Bush statue housed in the lobby of the NSF building. Córdova handed the statuette to Marcia McNutt, president of the US National Academy of Sciences, who co-sponsored the one-day symposium, “The Endless Frontier: The Next 75 Years in Science,” with The Kavli Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in Washington, DC, on February 26, 2020. To introduce the symposium, McNutt said, “Science as practiced today is far more
international, more collaborative, more interdisciplinary, more dependent on data and observations from novel and expensive facilities, more important to economic prosperity, and a greater driver of social change than it was when Dr. Bush laid down the roadmap for the endless frontier.” Policymakers, scientists, and CEOs from government, academia, industry, and philanthropic foundations paid respect to Bush’s vision and launched discussions of what the science policy blueprint should be for the next 75 years.
Materials science fits prominently in the future of R&D
As the bedrock from which “stuff” is made, materials science fits prominently in the future of R&D. Among the NSF’s “10 Big Ideas,” for example, is the “Quantum Leap,” which funds research
in quantum materials to revolutionize technologies such as sensors, computers, modeling, and communications (see MRS Bulletin, doi:10.1557/mrs.2020.76). “The endless frontier continues to be a humantechnology frontier, posing ethical challenges,” said Córdova. Therefore, NSF approaches future scientific challenges “through the combination of diverse expertise,” she said, that will be propelled by machine learning, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and robotics. At the symposium, L. Rafael Reif, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), reiterated that artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum science, and clean energy, as well as the next wave of telecommunications, make his short list of critical science and technology (S&T) fields. Republican US Senator Lamar Alexander said, within his introductory remarks at the symposium, that clean energy solutions is his proposed “Manhattan project.” Alexander, who chairs the Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development within the Senate Committee on Appropriations, said that meeting the grand challenges for energy “would create breakthroughs, for example, in advanced nuclear reactors, natural gas, carbon capture, better batteries, greener buildings, electric vehicles, cheaper solar, and fusion.” He lauded Oak Ridge National Laboratory, part of the original Manhattan Project, in his home state of Tennessee
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