BU College of Engineering Magazine
Spring 2004

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On My Mind
By David K. Campbell, Dean

When I began the discussion of the “ecology of technology” in the Spring 2003 issue of this magazine, I had no intention of publishing a roman feuilleton on the subject. But the strong response from you to the first and second installments, and the recent emergence of a further threat to our technological ecosystem, have convinced me to write a third, and hopefully final, editorial on this subject. I start on a positive note by presenting a case study that illustrates the great successes that a properly functioning technological ecosystem can achieve. I then summarize succinctly (and thus without a lot of additional explanation) the various present-day threats to the ecosystem that supports our technology, to illustrate how (as in a real ecosystem) these threats are interwoven in complex ways (sometimes synergetic, sometimes conflicting), and conclude with some suggestions for possible courses of action to reduce these threats and stabilize the ecology of technology. As always, I look forward to your comments.

The Ecology of Technology, Part Three

In the two previous “On My Mind” columns, I argued that the infrastructure that underpins America’s world-leading technology—which drives our economy and economic competitiveness, supports our military prowess, and enables our advances in medicine and health—faces a number of worrying threats, some of fairly recent origin, some longer term. For emphasis, I chose the apparently oxymoronic title “The Ecology of Technology” and argued that, left unchecked, these threats could destroy our technological infrastructure as surely as pollution can destroy a coral reef.

As an example of our technological ecosystem functioning at its best, let’s examine briefly how it enabled the recent explosive growth of the Internet, which has produced a sea change in our economy and our daily lives.

The Internet began in 1969 as the “Arpanet,” a U.S. government-supported research project under the aegis of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (APRA) to design a robust, high-speed data transfer and communications system that could link research (and military) computers. During its twenty years of existence, Arpanet spread to research institutions in government, industrial, and university laboratories, initially within the U.S. and then abroad. The concept of a “world-wide web” linking computers world wide was invented in 1989 at the CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) by Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer software expert (who is now a professor at MIT) and became widely accessible to the academic community, with “line mode” browsers during the early 1990s.

In 1993, Marc Andreessen and several fellow University of Illinois undergraduates working at the NSF-sponsored National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana created Mosaic, a user-friendly point and click Internet browser. Two years later, with the support of high-tech venture capitalist Jim Clark, Andreessen led the development of Netscape’s commercial web browser, and the rest is … not just history, but Yahoo, Google, e-Bay, Amazon.com, and a host of other companies now known to virtually everyone in the developed world. In this case, all elements of our technological ecosystem worked in harmony: Government funding provided the initial boost, academic institutions provided the research infrastructure and the bright young minds, U.S. and foreign scientists interacted openly and successfully, and key high-tech industrialists seized on the idea and commercialized it.

To ensure that our technological ecosystem can produce similar successes in the future, we must understand and counter the following seven significant threats to its health:

Threat 1: Our present K-12 education in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines is inadequate to train a properly diverse cohort of students motivated to continue in technological fields. This threatens the quality and size of the home-grown, technically trained work force necessary to support our technology.

Threat 2: Recently imposed immigration restrictions have added barriers and disincentives for outstanding foreign students and scholars to study in the U.S., reducing their vital contributions to, and thereby endangering, our basic research enterprise, which drives our cycle of innovation.

Threat 3: Over the past two decades, the federal support for research in science and technology has become grossly imbalanced, with the traditional STEM disciplines funded relatively much less well than medical research (see graph on page 3 for a dramatic confirmation of this fact). This again limits our ability to innovate by reducing fundamental discoveries that will lead ultimately to new technologies.

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