W.O. Baker Addresses Federation of Materials Societies
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W.O. Baker Addresses Federation of Materials Societies The Federation of Materials Societies (FMS) conferred its 1987 National Materials Advancement Award on Dr. William O. Baker during ceremonies in Washington, DC on December 10,1987. Dr. Baker is a former president of Bell Laboratories and recipient of the 1978 MRS Von Hippel Award. The following is an edited version of Baker's address to the FMS. Now that glasnost can be suitably succeeded by glass-wise (the glassy state), we are nevertheless further alert to a changed world. We are in the conventional condition of wondering, and preparing for the future, while slightly uneasy that it is already here. This does mean that mind-sets and expectations are important, not only for international politics and security, but for industry, economy, technology, and science as well. Expectations are especially energizing. Indeed, instinctive scientific and technical expectations of President Eisenhower based on discoveries in semiconductors and polymers added crucial impetus to the origins of the present national multidisciplinary laboratory and academic progress in materials research and development. But the Federation of Materials Societies represents a far larger arena than even the vast horizons of materials R&D. Its member societies and their thousands of constituents practice materials science, engineering, production, and economics in ways whose history of achievement, paralleling that of civilization itself, curiously can even be a drag on mind-sets and policies important for materials now and in the next century. The successes in minerals, metals, plastics, textiles, paper and films, finishes, and all are so taken for granted that expectations for the future are often less than they should be. This seeming anomaly arises because national and international attention are nowadays focused on high-tech enterprises. These are so named since they reflect, both politically and economically, the applications of the scientific and technical shaping of modern affairs. They involve indeed the nucleus, the crystal, the MRS BULLETIN/MARCH 1988
cell—the cosmos—energy, information and communications, biomedicine, and space exploration. But the interesting fact is that...materials have been and will be the essence of each of these vital and dynamic frontiers. So this is a welcome occasion to emphasize that the expectations and strategies of materials technology, engineering and applications must now recognize the intrinsic high-tech nature of the field—of its industry, its educational elements and its governmental, and political and economic impacts. For instance, the President's new Critical Materials Council, under the lively leadership of Bob Wilson, is properly concerned with synthetic and composite structures, reaching far beyond the conventional stockpiling or access to raw materials. The policy being shaped also is sharply aware of the demands on mine and forest to meet exacting design specifications hardly known in the factories of a decade or more ago. Similarly, in the n
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