Future R&D Environments A Report for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (2002) / Chapter Skim
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4 Pull Factors
4 Pull Factors
Pages 49-62
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From page 49... ...
Others, however, are less convinced that the matter is so simple. Their position, sometimes called soft determinism, is that technological development and adoption involve a more interactive process.
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From page 50... ...
. Our ever-increasing ability to alter biological forms and to change what many would view as the natural course of life is challenging personal beliefs, raising deep ethical questions, and leading to society-wide discussions about whether we should do all the things we can do.
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From page 51... ...
Antiterrorism products purchased by state and local governments as well as the private sector will need to be tested and validated for effectiveness and reliability, and standards for interoperability will need to be developed. All this will have to be achieved in the face of changes in the conduct of research itself, including improved security measures for classified work, increased scrutiny of science and engineering students and researchers, especially foreign students and researchers, and limitations on the sharing of some scientific information with scientists in other countries, all of which impinge on the tradition of open dialogue among scientists, which has always hastened progress.
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From page 52... ...
Still another complicating factor, particularly in Europe but also in the United States, is the uncomfortable history of the eugenics movement. It has led a number of people to be concerned that genetic engineering will reinforce unhealthy normative notions of human perfection, leading to the view that people with disabilities or whose physical appearance does not conform to those norms are inferior.
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From page 53... ...
This reinforces the need for objective procedures for establishing scientific fact at the international level when important public policy rests on the outcome. There are similar differences with respect to medical technologies namely, the United States and the European Union have markedly different approaches to regulating medical devices.
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From page 54... ...
But the concern about total cost and the fact there is likely to be differential access to new technologies because health insurance is not universal present difficult social problems that will undoubtedly affect the rate of adoption of medical technologies in the next decade. For example, if chip diagnostic manufacturers want to compete in the $19 billion diagnostic market, the assays they develop will have to be inexpensive.
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From page 55... ...
Because this kind of adverse selection would be applied to a person who has no more than the potential for a certain disease, it would significantly extend the kind of adverse selection traditionally applied by insurance companies to people with preexisting conditions. Many would argue that such Reselection would compromise an individual's entitlement to equal protection under the law.
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From page 56... ...
The Internet's openness and its historical and deliberate lack of governance structure will also conflict with the desire of governments to provide consumer protection for those doing business on the Internet, to enforce intellectual property laws, to deal with taxation issues, or to resolve jurisdictional issues. Because the Internet is global, it is to be expected that issues of harmonization will be very important in both governmental and commercial terms.
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From page 57... ...
This, in turn, has given rise to pressures to remove those compounds, to prevent them from entering the environment in the first place, or to improve our understanding of dose/ response effects for various potential toxins in order to establish a rational basis for setting tolerance limits. Third, the correlations among gross world product, energy use, and environmental stress create significant tensions between the justifiable desire to improve the income and standard of living of people all over the world and the equally justifiable desire to protect the environment.
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From page 58... ...
Remote satellite observations have provided an enormous amount of retrospective and prospective data on the consequences of warming and the spread and effect of various pollutants. Advances in sensors as well as in remote imaging have played an important role in monitoring compliance with international treaties such as the treaty governing transboundary air pollution.
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From page 59... ...
Since only one nation will ultimately gain the advantage in a particular area, the investments by other nations will have been wasted. The growth of scientific and technological capacity throughout the developed world will certainly continue in the next decade, and slow but steady growth can also be expected in certain of the newly industrialized nations.
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From page 60... ...
It will be interesting to see whether advances in information technology in the next decade reduce the value and cachet of a country's possessing large experimental facilities, encouraging more cooperative big science projects. It will also be interesting to see whether the inability of our superconducting supercollider to attract international sponsorship will lead us to find better ways of seeking international cooperation early on in the planning of large facilities in order to create an atmosphere of partnership.
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From page 61... ...
But the very success of these examples of technological diffusion created huge markets and industries that stimulated civilian R&D and led to the current situation, in which the most sophisticated technologies are being developed in the civilian sector and later subsequently adapted for military use. This has required a sea change in the culture of the military technology establishment, which is well under way.
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From page 62... ...
Moreover, the threat posed by the possible misuse of genetic engineering to create highly virulent species is likely to increase public distrust of the use of those same techniques to improve the quality of food, the hardiness of plants, and the yield of crops. Therefore, if the threat of biological terrorism grows in the next decade, the application of genetically modified organisms for other purposes is likely to be severely restricted.
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