Voting for Materials Research
- PDF / 694,873 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 604.8 x 806.4 pts Page_size
- 8 Downloads / 170 Views
Voting for Materials Research
Election Day in the United States is fast approaching. As in every election, this will be the time when the seeds are sown for far-reaching actions of government, whose policies will have powerful short-range and long-range effects on the well-being of the United States and indeed of the world. In this letter I ' would like to remind you of some of the important issues which significantly affect materials research, and issues which deserve the contribution of materials people in informed debate. There has never been a more important time for engineers and scientists to take the initiative and discuss these issues with their candidates, capture their attention and interest, and establish lines of communication that may later continue right into the legislature. Now is the time for your opinions to be heard, and I urge you to consider how you can personally take a constructive part in this election. I do not mean to direct this letter only to U.S. voting members of the Materials Research Society. I believe many similar issues will be found to be equally important in every nation where materials researchers may choose to contribute to their national and local decision-making processes. Is your candidate knowledgeable on materials issues and materials research? Is he or she willing to listen and capable of grasping technical matters? Do they care? Can you encourage them to care? In the spirit of stimulating action, I am going to list some topics that occur to me as ripe for discussion. I urge you to add your own and to act with such issues in mind. MRS BULLETIN/SEPTEMBER 1988
Funding for Materials Research Government avenues of materials research funding include support of national laboratories and government laboratories, and contracts with universities and industry. Is the overall commitment large enough to sustain the nation's technical and academic good health? Should the shift of emphasis towards technology development continue? Are funding decisions made with adequate technical understanding and consultation? How should the conflicting claims of "big science" vs. "small science" be resolved in the area of materials? Materials research has become one of the fastest growing disciplines of our time, representing as it does an orderly convergence of the traditional disciplines, in which chemistry, physics, metallurgy, engineering, geosciences, biosciences, etc., are combined in the discovery, understanding and development of new advanced materials and processes. Does research funding distribution properly reflect the power and potential of materials research today? Environment for Industrial Research Industrial investment in materials research, especially at a fundamental level, is notoriously vulnerable to the financial climate. Only the most enlightened and secure corporations can maintain a large commitment to long-term basic research in the face of pressures to show short-term returns in periods of economic difficulty. Yet neglect of basic research must jeopardize innovative techno
Data Loading...
