Dr. Joseph Bordogna
Chief Operating Officer
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Tech Trends 2001
Atlantic City, New Jersey
April 18, 2001
I want to thank Peter Herczfeld for his consistently
fine work on the TechTrends events. These meetings
illuminate the important role of public and private
collaboration in the funding of science and engineering
for America's future.
As some of you may know, Pennsylvania is my home and
most of my history. I am so pleased to see that it's
Congressional and State Delegations -- along with
those of Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware - are
presenting this year's event.
I especially appreciate the opportunity to address
a subject close to my heart, at the center of NSF's
mission, and critical to our nation's future. The
capabilities required of a 21st century
workforce to meet this nation's defense and economic
needs, is nothing less than urgent.
We know that the future never looks like the past,
despite the fact that philosopher/educator George
Santayana warned us that, "those who cannot remember
the past are condemned to repeat it." Santayana was
warning us that the past always has lessons that we
must carry into the future, or we will repeat all
the old mistakes. He never suggested that in any future
we would be confronting the same thinking, trends,
tools, or technologies.
In fact, we live in such a hyper accelerated world
that tomorrow can be light-years different from today.
When we speak of ancient events, we often distinguish
them in time by BC or AD. In this era, scholars are
already referring to time as 'before and after the
PC.' And twenty years hence, our current society is
likely to be completely transformed by the fledgling
technologies that are emerging today.
So this morning, I want to talk briefly about five
capabilities that I believe will be front-and-center
in the first part of the 21st century.
They are nanoscale, terascale, cognition, complexity,
and holism. The confluence of these capabilities has
the potential to revolutionize form and function in
Let me spend a few minutes on each, and then I hope
we can have a lively question and answer period.
The term nano encompasses nanoscale science
and engineering. Its focus is at the molecular and
atomic level of things, both natural and human-made.
It was a brief twenty years ago, with the invention
at IBM of the scanning/tunneling microscope, that
we could first observe molecules on a surface.
But how small is nanoscale, and what can we do with
this capability? First, nanoscale is three orders
of magnitude smaller than most of today's human-made
devices. One nanometer is one billionth of a meter.
We've become used to the term micro for the past few
decades; well, it's going to be a nano world from
Nanotechnology gives us the ability to manipulate matter
one atom or molecule at a time. This technology could
lead to a future of dramatic breakthroughs. For example,
molecular computers could store the equivalent of
the U.S. Library of Congress in a device any of us
Nanostructures are at the confluence of the smallest
human-made devices and the large molecules of living
systems. Individual atoms are a few tenths
of a nanometer. To use another comparison, DNA molecules
are about 2.5 nanometers wide. Biological cells, such
as red blood cells, have diameters in the range of
thousands of nanometers. Microelectromechanical systems
are now approaching this same scale. This suggests
a most exciting prospect. We are now at the point
of being able to connect machines to individual living
Nano application is not completely new; it has already
been used in photography and in catalysis. But until
recently, it was primarily confined to those areas.
Now, we will be able to build a "wish list" of properties
into structures large and small. We will design automobile
tires atom by atom. With the nano-capability to pattern
recording media in nanoscale layers and dots, the
information on a thousand CDs could be packed into
the space of a wristwatch. We could have golf club
shafts as thin as fishing lines.
Let's look at a few industries to see what nano might
hold for their futures. In the automotive and aeronautics
industries, we can foresee nanoparticle reinforced
materials for lighter bodies, external painting that
does not need washing, cheap non-flammable plastics,
and self-repairing coatings and textiles.
In the electronics and communications industries,
recording in all media will be able to be accomplished
in nanolayers and dots. This includes flat panel displays
and wireless technology. An entire range of new devices
and processes with startling ratios of improvement
await us across communication and information technologies.
It will be possible to vastly increase data storage
capacity and processing speeds. This will be accompanied
by both lower cost and improved power efficiency compared
to current electronic circuits.
In the field of chemicals and materials, we
foresee more catalysts that increase the energy and
combustion efficiency of chemical plants, super-hard
and tough (not brittle) drill bits and cutting tools,
and "smart"magnetic fluids for vacuum seals and lubricants.
In the burgeoning areas of pharmaceuticals, health
care and life sciences, we will see new nanostructured
drugs and drug delivery systems targeted to specific
sites in the body. Researchers anticipate biocompatible
replacements for body parts and fluids, and material
for bone and tissue regeneration.
In manufacturing, we can expect precision engineering
based on new generations of microscopes and measuring
techniques, and new processes and tools to manipulate
matter at the atomic level. These are just the beginning.
Every field and industry will be able to capitalize
on nano innovations.
The new nano capability brings together many
disciplines of science and engineering to work in
collaboration. Its scope and scale create an overarching,
enabling field, not unlike the role of information
The expansion of our nanocapability will depend on
insightful researchers envisioning -- imagining --
its possibilities -- talented people with good ideas
throughout academe and industry.
Terascale computing is shorthand for computing technology
that takes us three orders of magnitude beyond prevailing
computing capabilities. In the past, our system architectures
could only handle hundreds of processors. Now we work
with systems of thousands of processors. Shortly,
we'll connect millions of systems and billions of
'information appliances' to the Internet. Crossing
that boundary of 10^12th - one trillion
operations per second - launches us to new frontiers.
Take for example protein synthesis within a cell. It
requires 20 milliseconds for a nascent protein to
fold into its functional conformation. However, it
takes 40 months of processor time on current systems
to simulate that folding. With a terascale system,
we reduce that time to one day -- one thousand times
faster. Think what that means for the task of functional
genomics, that is, putting our DNA sequence knowledge
When we dramatically advance the speed of our capability
in any, area we give researchers and industrialists
the mechanism to get to a frontier much faster or,
better yet in terms of NSF's mission, to reach a frontier
that had been, heretofore, unreachable, as well as
The revolution in information technologies connected
and integrated researchers and research fields
in a way never before possible. The nation's IT capability
has acted like 'adrenaline' to all of science and
engineering. A next step was to build the most advanced
computing infrastructure for researchers to use, while
simultaneously broadening its accessibility.
Fields like physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering
are high-end computational fields. Researchers need
the fastest machines to predict the behavior of storms
or simulate 'protein folding,' or find the origin
of our rising sea level. Computer Science researchers
also need this capability to continue advancing their
Our vision is to reach terascale competency and catapult
capability into a whole new era of science and engineering.
In essence, we want to create a "tera universe or
era" for science and engineering ... and a freshly
robust national "cyberinfrastructure."
Progress in 21st century science and engineering
depends upon access to world-class tools and infrastructure.
From past experience, we know that infrastructures
can either expand or inhibit our potential.
An infrastructure system can provide potential in
one era, but drag us into obsolescence in another
So, in a sense, infrastructure can be thought of as
'perishable.' This is an important understanding because
what is state-of-the-art today is conventional tomorrow.
As exciting and futuristic as terascale is now, someday
it will be eclipsed by something beyond today's furthest
And even the best tools are useless without well-trained
people who have the capacity to pose challenging questions,
conceptualize critical issues, identify opportunities,
and employ their skills to derive answers.
This brings me to the third capability we need to
expand, cognition. Most of us would use the term learning.
Learning is the foundation of all other capabilities,
human and institutional. Our understanding of the
learning process holds the key to tapping the potential
of every child, empowering a 21st century
workforce, and, in fact, maintaining our democracy.
From the last 30 years of research, we know that people,
both young and old, absorb and assimilate knowledge
in different ways, and in more than one way. So the
"science of learning" is a critical inquiry into how
Our understanding of the learning process has changed
dramatically since the time I was growing up. Then
the dogma was 'diligent drilling and rote memorization.'
Now, it has shifted to students' understanding and
application of knowledge.
Industry foots a multibillion-dollar bill each year
on training of every kind for its employees. This
money is not only well spent but perhaps even 'best'
spent. State-of-the-art industrial facilities and
equipment and a national cyberinfrastructure are of
little value without equally sophisticated workforce
skills and knowledge. The new educational technologies
tooled to individual learning styles could transform
worker education and training.
By focusing on cognition, we will advance our capability
in everything from teaching children how to read to
building human-like computers and robots. Industry
can capitalize on this knowledge in training initiatives,
in the manufacturing process, and in the development
of new products in a field that is blossoming. But,
fundamentally we will help empower people and thus
empower the nation, all of which can lead to wealth
creation, and social progress currently unimaginable.
Now to the 4th and 5th capabilities,
complexity and holism. They act as two sides of a
coin to guide us in the best way to use our accumulated
knowledge of science and technology to discover new
knowledge and better understand how to use it.
Mitch Waldrop, in his book Complexity, writes
about a point we often refer to as "the edge of chaos."
"where the components of a system never quite lock
into place, and yet never quite dissolve into
turbulence either.... The edge of chaos is where
new ideas and innovative genotypes are forever
nibbling away at the edges of the status quo..."
This territory of complexity is 'a space of opportunity,'
a place to make a marriage of unlike partners or disparate
Today, researchers are trying to put polymers together
with silicon, a marriage of opposites because plastics
are chaotic chains while silicon is composed of orderly
crystals. The result can give us electronic devices
with marvelous flexibility that are also much less
expensive. The awareness of 'complexity' makes us
nimble and opportunistic seekers not only in our science
and engineering knowledge but in our industrial institutions.
If we train workers to think with this awareness,
we will be able to identify and capitalize on those
fringe territories which have so much potential.
Holism is the "flip side" of the complexity coin.
Holism and complexity have a symbiotic relationship.
Complexity teaches us to look at places of dissonance
or disorder in a field as windows of possibility.
Holism teaches us that combinations of things have
a power and capability greater than the sum of their
Holism is far from a new idea. We have seen it work
in social structures since the beginning of civilization.
Something new happens in this integration process.
A singular or separate dynamic emerges from the interaction.
Although holism is an ancient dynamic, what is new
is that it can be applied to the vast accumulated
knowledge of science and engineering and the new knowledge
that is burgeoning as we speak.
When we train students and workers to think about complexity
and holism as two sides of a coin, we develop a pattern
or attitude to search for the disordered fringes of
a field and to pick out fragments of possibility.
With these pieces of potential, different 'wholes'
can be created in new integration. The possibilities
are endless when you think about the flexible building
power that nanotechnology will provide, the enormous
insight from research in cognition, and the ratcheting
up of speed that terascale computing offers.
Now if you take each of these five capabilities and
you ask, what is the 'constant' or fundamental ingredient;
it's the simple formula of talented people and the
power of their new ideas. They make the leaps that
move civilizations from one era into the next. In
both defense and economic applications, these breakthroughs
in thinking and in technology can move us from a plateau
to the summit. The important thing to remember is
that the summit is always a moving target, so we must
anticipate only a brief moment to take in the new
landscape. By then we will always be joined by others
and the summit is yet another leap.
I look forward to a robust discussion.