Exploring the frontiers of the future: "One of the central challenges for the future is that we don't know what we don't know." - Science & Technology

AS AN AMERICAN on a long trek overseas in 1996, I was surprised at each stop--Italy, Germany, Egypt, Great Britain--to discover that much of the fare on television consists of old American movies, more specifically, old westerns. Each movie was dubbed into the local language, ending with Gary Cooper (or his equivalent) riding off into the sunset. The ubiquity of these images suggests to me that, in any land and language, the American Old West speaks in some important way to the human imagination--notwithstanding all of the evils that accompanied the "taming" of this vast part of the U.S. The lure of the unknown reaches into the human psyche. These' stories of awakening new possibilities and exploring unknown territory engage the human spirit and elicit deep longings. While not everyone wants to blaze a new trail, almost everyone wants to know what the trailblazers find.

The Old West has passed. We have explored the globe and its immediate surroundings in space. As evidence, even in the most remote places of Antarctica or many miles above the Earth, one can find human debris. Still, there remains that deep human longing to explore, to discover that yet unknown, but where are the new frontiers? These opportunities are, for the most part, no longer geographic, but a vast unknown space remains in understanding the workings of the natural world. Our quest to explore this realm will not only yield new insights, but provide applications and technology that will change us and our society.

Exploration today, as over the ages, presents both great possibilities and significant challenges. As we confront the frontiers of the natural world, one of the foremost challenges in the 21st century is the speed at which developments occur. To illustrate, in 1972, when I came to Rice University as an assistant professor, personal computers did not exist. There was no such thing as a World Wide Web, e-mail, a facsimile machine, or Federal Express. Communication was by telephone, mail (using an eight-cent stamp), or face-to-face. We stood then at the edge of discoveries that would revolutionize the way people interact across the globe. These findings emerged from our efforts to understand the natural world in which we live and the principles underlying how things work.

Advances in information technology in the late 20th century fundamentally changed the way we work, with no doubt a great deal more change to come. In the past, personal interaction was confined to one's immediate vicinity. Today, many of us make contacts on a global scale, and these interconnections will expand further and deeper in the world's population as we become able to sit around a table--whether business or personal--in virtual space. Communication is just one arena in which the scientific discoveries and technological developments of the past three decades have been the catalyst for unprecedented social and economic change. Michio Kaku, author of Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century, notes the development of quantum mechanics, discovery of DNA, and invention of the digital computer as the products of the 20th century he believes will impel the most important developments of the 21 st century.

In the past three decades, our increased technological capacity has accelerated the rate of acquisition and transmission of information and knowledge. In the not-so-distant past, master craftsmen would pass on generations of accumulated experience and knowledge to apprentices, who then would pass it on to their professional progeny. At present, information is accumulating so rapidly that we must habitually learn many new things--even take on one or more entirely new careers. As a small illustration, today's desktop computer has 10 times the computing power of the entire U.S. space program during NASA's mission to the moon in 1969. In that same period, has the capacity of the human brain to process information increased tenfold?

A consequence of this rapid information accumulation is that we can no longer steep students thoroughly in one arena. Instead, we must teach them a process of continuous learning and adapting to an ever-changing intellectual environment, taking in new territory daily. Today's students must manage the plethora of information now available and distill useful and applicable knowledge. As a way of developing these skills, at Rice, we incorporate modern research efforts into many corners of undergraduate education to nurture the ability to cope with the ever-rolling frontiers of knowledge. Even in our "routine laboratories," we have instituted modular sets of experiments whereby students make choices without predetermined outcomes. We understand that the new territories before us require not just current exploration, but the training of future pioneers (another important topic on its own).

This trek into new territory does not involve just scientists and engineers--all of us are carded along on this journey. The consequences of discovery--as for the explorers of history--eventually touch everyone on the globe. As a scientist, a daily challenge is to keep up with everything that is happening in my specific field. As an individual, I also struggle to take in and adapt to the incredibly rapid pace with which information accumulates and the world around me is transformed. Despite this accelerating pace of advancement, there remain--at least in the intellectual realm--seats of tradition. These are our universities, particularly disciplinary departments within them. Of higher education's three core missions--the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge--the last two are inherently conserving and conservative. The vital role of preserving and passing on knowledge to future generations becomes even more important to society as the pace of change increases. Departments are the disciplinary bastions within universities and serve as the key arbiters of change.

Interestingly, however, the new frontiers of discovery are often at the interfaces between disciplines. Confinement in a department--that can sometimes appear to be a walled city under siege--does not breed much interaction and exploration of the frontier. Balancing the flexibility required to meet new challenges at the intersection of disciplines with sufficient stability to conserve and transmit knowledge is essential for the 21st century. To achieve this balance, Rice University has recognized the importance of the fundamental structure--including tradition and continuity--provided by discipline-centered departments as well as the necessity to breach protective disciplinary walls. The result has been the creation of centers and institutes in which faculty and students from multiple departments bring their differing viewpoints to address emerging, dynamic research issues. This balance of stability and flexibility provides an intellectual context in which students and faculty can explore without losing the security of the disciplinary perspective.

Nano-bio-info-enviro

What are some of the specific frontiers for these first years of the 21 st century? Four key areas are emerging that bring together a diverse set of disciplines: nanoscale science and technology (nano), biological and biomedical science and technology (bio), information science and technology (info), and environmental science and technology (enviro). Each of these areas cuts a wide swath of territory and reaches into the traditional areas of science--chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and earth science--touching different subcommunities. The intellectual, technical, and commercial products of the interconnection among the sciences and engineering disciplines are reshaping our future.

Because they are best known to me, I will provide examples of some of the most exciting and far-reaching developments arising from Rice's institutional priority accorded to the "quadrumvirate" of nano-bio-info-enviro. The excitement that has emerged to date from these areas gives us but a vague preview of what we can expect over the next two decades. These areas promise even more advances--propelling us into new materials, modes of detection and analysis, understandings of ourselves and the natural world, and possibilities for medicine, manufacturing, and human endeavors.

In the nanoscale world, the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of an entirely new form of carbon--[C.sub.60] or buckminsterfullerene--at Rice in 1996 opened a whole new field of chemistry. The study of carbon nanotubes, a small step from [C.sub.60] "bucky balls" continues unabated. These nanotubes have manifold applications: molecular electronics (with even the possibility of superconductivity at achievable temperatures), unique delivery systems, and generation of novel materials, to name a few. Nanoshells formed of gold--nanomaterials used to carry medicines to specific sites--are emerging. Developments in the nanoscale world will have broad impact and can open possibilities that have raised both excitement and concern.

Information technology has transformed our lives, but in the next phase of development, we are likely to have at our fingertips the processing power of ultra-high-performance computing with the attendant ability to reach vast stores of information and use it effectively. The world has been changed by the advances in information science that occurred in the last century. We can anticipate that we will be led into completely new arenas of understanding and function by the developments that lie ahead in this area. Already, almost every appliance, as well as larger machinery, has computer circuitry, but miniaturization of circuits and advances in programming will bring unimagined range and pervasiveness of computing into our lives.

Rice has had a strong presence in developing parallel processing (using multiple "computers" for a single task to complete it more quickly), but recent efforts to interweave countless computers, databases, instruments, and people into a pervasive seamless network, called the Grid, will expand both opportunity and capacity. Similarly, our efforts in digital signal processing point the way to speech recognition and real-time language translation, as well as surveillance and exploration of the Earth and space. These advances in information technology will affect education and research more broadly.

Information technology has altered the way in which we do research, providing new tools and allowing acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data in an unprecedented manner. This impact has been as significant on the biological/biomedical sciences as the advent of molecular biology, when the ability to manipulate DNA sequences transformed biology, reunifying at a fundamental level its fragmented branches. In recognition of this reality, Rice and fellow institutions in the Gulf Coast area began the Keck Center for Computational Biology over a decade ago to integrate the tools of information technology with discovery in biological sciences. These tools impact studies that range from design of proteins with specific properties (e.g., development of blood substitutes with a long shelf life using molecular biological and biophysical methods) to engineering cells and tissues for specific applications, developing methods to provide nonrejectable materials for bone or organ transplants to a myriad of other approaches.

We can anticipate a plethora of novel and important developments in the biological sciences in the coming years. DNA-based methods will diagnose disease, predict response to pharmaceuticals, and may even be used to treat human ills. Stem cells offer the potential to replace damaged organs, and further advancements in DNA-based technology promise to change the landscape of medicine. A number of societal issues are raised by these advances, and the multitude of decisions ahead will affect all of us.

Nowhere is the need for engagement in the policymaking process more important than on environmental issues. How can we sustain all life on Earth--not just human life? In the environmental arena, terrestrial explorations increasingly focus on how billions of humans can occupy this limited space in ways that ensure continued survival. At Rice, faculty and students are exploring mechanisms to preserve air and water quality, examining how to recycle materials on our campus and more broadly, and discovering and managing energy resources effectively. Environmental science and technology will be crucial in making life on our planet sustainable. Moreover, biotechnology, information technology, and nanotechnology will be an important part of creating the advances necessary to ensure the preservation of an environment conducive to human existence.

Challenges for the future

One of the central challenges for the future is that we don't know what we don't know. For example, we are often surprised by unexpected effects of a specific biological modification. In the context of human cloning or genetic manipulation, do we know enough to decide which genes are necessary for survival of humans in 100 or 1,000 years? Because the future often surprises us with what we didn't know that we didn't know, setting out specific, targeted research goals for even one area, much less all of science, is perilous. A shift has occurred in natural funding over the past few decades, from exploring new frontiers driven by our curiosity and the desire for greater understanding to a requirement for applications. We must proceed with the awareness that we are not aware of what has not yet been discovered, and we must search on all fronts, rather than focus or limit our endeavors unnecessarily.

A historical perspective immediately shows that many key discoveries originated from research that was simply to explore new ground, to understand something previously unknown. We are in danger of ignoring the critical importance of supporting research driven by curiosity, by the desire to understand and discover, not by specific goals and application. Our capacity to predict is limited. Whoever would have thought that a new form of carbon would be discovered in our life-time? Looking for it would probably not have focused where it was found.

The fundamental tool without which modern molecular biology would not exist--a specific set of enzymes with the ability to fragment DNA at a specific sequence--was discovered as a by-product of studies to understand the interesting and curious phenomenon of "restriction" in bacteria. While some may claim insight in hindsight, the suggestion that studying restriction in bacteria would quite literally revolutionize biology would have been met with skepticism, if not derision. Yet, that is indeed what happened.

Maintaining a strong presence in basic research does not mean abandoning the road to applications. In following our curiosity as well as generating specific applications of discoveries, we must also attempt--despite the evident limits to prediction and extrapolation--to understand where we are headed, to try to figure out what we don't yet know. Interestingly, some of the most-accurate predictions of the future are found in science fiction, where imagination, rather than our current understanding, guides. Novel leaps are sometimes possible when not limited by today's perspective. Going all the way back to Jules Verne, those writers were pointing to something they intuitively saw about the future.

As we move forward, we must reflect on what we are doing, as scientists and citizens, and attempt to understand--to the degree possible --the consequences of the directions in which we are headed. We should always be thinking about where this line of inquiry potentially ends up and questioning whether that is a place we want to be. What are the long-term implications for society of what we do? As knowledge accumulates and the world becomes increasingly dependent on advanced technologies of all types, scientists must engage in conversation with the larger society. A scientifically literate public is essential because many decisions that will have major impact on the future have at their heart scientific and technological advances. Indeed, the exciting frontiers of the 21st century will require dedicated trailblazers and a supportive and knowledgeable public to explore and eventually populate this territory.

Kathleen S. Matthews is dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences and the Stewart Memorial Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Rice University, Houston, Tex. Her current research interests target protein-DNA interactions involved in regulating gene expression.

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