At Mid-Decade, Forecasters Taking A Look Into Science And Technology Crystal Ball

Sidebar: A Checklist for Evaluating Forecasts With the year 2000 approaching, scientific, environmental, technology, and health organizations have been making predictions about the state of science and technology in the next five years and beyond, as have some individuals. Many such agencies and associations are also using the approaching turn of the century to set goals for themselves. Should the predictions come true and the goals be met by the start of the next century, forecasters anticipate, the world will be rid of polio, Internet cruisers will number 200 million, and more minorities will be attending medical school than ever before, among other prognostications. IN THE HERE AND NOW: "The use of a forecast is really in the present," contents futurist Andy Hines of policy-research firm Coates and Jarratt. Andy Hines, staff futurist at Washington, D.C.-based Coates and Jarratt Inc. -- a policy-research organization specializing in the study of the future for large corporations, trade associations, and some government agencies and academic institutions-stresses that although predictions or goals may turn out to be wrong or not achieved, they're still useful. "Being right is really not the goal of a forecast," he notes. "What you're really trying to get from a good forecast is to stimulate people's thinking. The use of a forecast is really in the present." When a prediction "becomes conventional wisdom, for better or worse," says Hines, trouble can arise. One much-hyped, but apparently erroneous, prediction that is still reverberating throughout the scientific community is the projection in several 1989 and 1990 reports of a shortage of scientists by the end of the 1990s (R. Finn, The Scientist, May 29, 1995, page 1). This forecast, in part, prompted a large upswing in graduate school enrollments. Because of several factors -- budget cuts and subsequent cutbacks in academic new hires, for example -- the shortfall has not materialized. Nonetheless, in the science and technology arena, all sorts of academic and industrial organizations, government agencies, and individuals are hopping on the prediction bandwagon. "There's just sheer excitement about the year 2000," says Hines. "There's a growing interest in taking a reasoned look at how technology might impact business. We posit that more and more of our economy is going to be derived from science and technology and R&D activities." He asserts that federal agencies are also interested in the implications of forecasts for helping to determine how to allocate taxpayer dollars. Hines maintains that projections have relevance for bench scientists as well as corporate CEOs and government officials: "A lot our clients are heads of R&D departments. One lesson that I really think is coming to the fore is that predictions open up insight into new disciplines and make new connections" for researchers and how they approach their work. Hines cautions, however, that "not all forecasts are created equal," and should be examined critically. In a recent article in The Futurist (29:20-24, November-December 1995), a magazine published by the World Future Society in Bethesda, Md., he compiled a checklist for evaluating the many predictions already made and those that undoubtedly will be (see list on page 7). Earlier this year, scientists from Battelle Memorial Institute, a research and technology consulting firm in Columbus, Ohio, published a list of what they determined will be the top-10 strategic technologies in terms of importance to industry in the year 2005. By Battelle's definition, a strategic technology is one that provides benefits to an end user; enjoys a protected and sustainable competitive advantage (as in price or patentability); and supports business goals. Three of the 10 technologies are directly related to the life sciences. In fact, Battelle researchers rated mapping of the human genome No. 1 in order of importance. Douglas E. Olesen, the company's president and CEO, wrote in a recent article describing the list (The Futurist, 29:10-13, September-October 1995): "We're standing at the threshold of a golden age for biology. . . . Genetic research may in the next 10 years lead to cures of specific types of cancer -- and possibly even AIDS." Other biotechnologies on the list include anti-aging products and services at No. 7. Olesen writes: "The aging of the youth- oriented baby boomers makes these technologies especially marketable." Precisely targeted medical instruments and drug- delivery systems ranked No. 8 on Battelle's list. The firm predicts that new diagnostic tools will be able to detect diseases earlier. LOOKING AHEAD: Battelle's Diane Cattran finds that more of her firms clients are interested in a glance at tomorrow's technology. Diane Cattran, market manager at the Battelle Technology Intelligence Program, the division that oversaw the project, says that the list has been well-received at industry workshops held worldwide. "We're starting to see that our clients, are very interested in a future look at technology," she reports. Battelle's clients, who pay between $10,000 and $1 million for this information, include pharmaceutical companies and some government agencies. POISED AND READY: IBM's John Patrick says industry is already restructuring to meet future Internet needs. And in this high-tech world envisioned by prognosticators such as Battelle, more and more people will probably be communicating via cyberspace. In a talk at the Internet World Conference in Boston last month, John Patrick, IBM's vice president of Internet applications, claimed that Internet use could grow by 200 million to 500 million people over the next five years. Estimates of present Internet use range anywhere from 6 million to 40 million people, according to experts. "A 50 percent growth rate would get you to over 200 million in five years," speculates Patrick in an E-mail interview with The Scientist. "I think we'll see at least that many. Perhaps more." Futurist Hines concurs: "That's not unreasonable." Achieving this level of use assumes that the Internet infrastructure will continue to grow to provide the needed connectivity. Patrick believes it will: "The Internet is like a fibrous root system growing its roots into bigger roots, thus allowing its branches to spawn new branches." This outspread also assumes that the capacity of hardware, such as bandwidth -- the difference between the upper and lower limits of signal transmission -- will continue to expand, says Patrick. "All indications are that it is happening, and perhaps even at a rate higher than the demand requires." He does not see any impediments to achieving this: "I believe the benefits are so large that all segments of the industry are reorienting themselves to insure that the infrastructure will be there." Some of the biomedical innovations anticipated by Battelle may help to achieve some of the goals set by health experts. In 1990, the Public Health Service (PHS) embarked on a program called Healthy People 2000. This endeavor set dozens of measurable objectives for the United States in 21 broad categories of human well-being, including fewer people smoking cigarettes, fewer deaths from flu and pneumonia, and more people with clean air in their communities. The mid-decade status of the project, as Michael McGinnis, former director of PHS's office of disease prevention and health promotion (which oversees the project), puts it, "is good news, but not good enough." An April article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (J.M. McGinnis, P.R. Lee, "Healthy People 2000 at Mid Decade," 273:1123-9, 1995) by McGinnis and fellow physician Philip Lee, PHS assistant secretary for health, lists 48 specific health objectives and how the American population is meeting them. McGinnis, who retired last August and is now a scholar in residence at the National Academy of Sciences, mentions that objectives for decreasing heart disease, cancer and stroke deaths, and gonorrhea rates, among others, are all "on path towards achieving the stated goals." Some categories, however, such as homicide and teen-pregnancy rates, are "going in the wrong direction," he stresses. "The goals are quite realistic," remarks Robert M. Kaplan, a professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine. He is especially heartened by the fact that nearly 15,000 public-health specialists were asked to contribute to formulating the goals. McGinnis adds that including many basic biomedical scientists in the goal-setting and -monitoring process gives this segment of the research community an opportunity to see how their fundamental investigations contribute to disease prevention. On a more global scale, the World Health Organization's World Health Assembly set the year 2000 as the target date for the global eradication of polio. There were about 6,000 cases of polio reported in 1994, an 83 percent decline from the 35,225 cases in 1988, when the assembly announced the campaign. GLOBAL ERADICATION: Polio is well on its way to being elminiated by the year 2000, says Ciro de Quatros. "I think it's doing extremely well, despite many difficulties, particularly money to buy vaccines and implement surveillance, especially in Africa," says Ciro de Quadros, director of the special program in vaccination and immunization at the Pan American Health Organization in Washington, D.C. Polio was chosen because "it can be eradicated," he explains. "We have a good vaccine for it and the virus does not live in the ambient environment." The last polio case in the Americas was reported in 1991 in Peru. Environmental organizations and scientists have been making predictions in a variety of categories for at least the last three decades. In 1990, Earth Day 2000, an information clearinghouse for environmental issues in San Francisco, was established to mark progress toward meeting several goals related to biodiversity, atmospheric ozone, agriculture, and pollution. Mary-Beth Baptista, the group's outreach coordinator, says that Earth Day 2000 is using the year 2000 to focus attention on environmental issues. 'CONCERNED, BUT HOPEFUL': Earth Day 2000's Mary-Beth Baptista sees environmental-law rollbacks impeding her group's goals. Futurist Hines notes that keeping track of environmental predictions and goals are important for such firms as energy and auto companies because they need to factor these ideas into their long-term business plans. "In light of the current [U.S.] political situation, we are concerned, but hopeful" about achieving Earth Day 2000's goals, relates Baptista. Although she considers action by Congress to "roll back" established environmental laws an obstacle, Baptista is optimistic: "We're hoping to stand our ground this year." Some environmental predictions have taken on a personal tone. Last May, Stephen Schneider and Paul Ehrlich, both professors in Stanford University's department of biological sciences, responded to a dare from Julian Simon, a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland (Notebook, The Scientist, June 12, 1995, page 30). In a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed article (May 12, 1995, page A25), Simon urged "doomsayer" environmentalists to wager "a week's or a month's pay that just about any trend pertaining to material human welfare will improve rather than get worse." Simon mentioned in the editorial environmental examples such as "some measure of air or water pollution" as fair game. Ehrlich and Schneider bet $1,000 on each of 15 currently negative trends, predicting that each would get worse by the year 2005. The trends that they anticipated would worsen included rising global temperature and an increase in such air pollutants as sulfur dioxide, nitrous dioxide, and near- surface ozone. Schneider is now calling the bet "nonexistent" because he says Simon has backed off, contending that Schneider and Ehrlich misinterpreted the challenge. "My offer to the doomsayers is to pick any measure of material human welfare," such as number of phones per person, explains Simon, as opposed to the purely environmental indicators that the Stanford professors offered in their challenge. Simon maintains that he's willing to bet that air or water quality will be better 10 years from now, but the other environmental trends posited by Schneider and Ehrlich do not fall under the category of material human welfare. Schneider acknowledges that some measures of environmental health, such as life expectancy, are getting better, "but the reason that people like Ehrlich or me dwell on the negative ones is that those are the ones you want to fix." Instead of making predictions about how many species will be lost by the year 2000, three systematics professional societies -- the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the Willi Hennig Society -- aim to catalog and describe the world's biodiversity. The effort, which started four years ago, is called Systematics Agenda 2000 (SA 2000). The first goal of the initiative is to discover and inventory global species diversity. "To a mammologist, that sounds like nothing, but to a mycologist [a scientist who studies fungi] that sounds utterly impossible," remarks Amy Rossman, a research mycologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture who sat on the steering committee to organize the project. Taxonomists estimate that for organisms larger than insects, such as mammals, about 80 percent to 100 percent of the species have been described. But for smaller creatures -- insects or fungi, for instance -- only 10 percent to 30 percent have been described. Rossman predicts that a related project will make "great strides" toward inventorying all the species in at least one area of great biodiversity -- a section of the species-rich Costa Rican rainforest being examined in a multiyear study led by ecologist Daniel Janzen, a professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Eventually, SA 2000 aims to organize vast amounts of taxonomic data into efficiently retrievable databases to aid in such efforts as searching for natural drugs, new crops, and biocontrol agents; measuring rates of extinctions and patterns of global change; and helping set conservation and natural resource policy. Several future-oriented programs are counting on younger generations to help achieve their goals. Project 3000 by 2000 -- launched by the Washington, D.C.-based Association of American Medical Colleges in 1991 -- is working to increase the number of ethnic minorities who annually enroll in the U.S.'s 126 medical schools to 3,000 by the year 2000 (K.Y. Kreeger, The Scientist, March 6, 1995, page 1). The target of 3,000 is "based on a round number that would be close to population parity," says Timothy Ready, the project's director, so as to match the proportion of minorities in the general U.S. population, which is roughly 18 percent. The project is more than two-thirds of the way toward meeting its goal -- 2,010 minorities have entered U.S. medical schools this year, out of a total of 16,253 new medical school students. Still other initiatives are reaching out to young people. In celebration of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and its president, Joseph Rotblat (K.Y. Kreeger, The Scientist, Nov. 13, 1995, page 1), Student Pugwash USA has launched a campaign to obtain a commitment from 1 million students and young professionals by the year 2000. The young people are being asked to pledge "to work for a better world, where science and technology are used in socially responsible ways." Student Pugwash is using the Internet and university contacts to collect as many pledges as possible by December 10, the day the Peace Prize is scheduled to be awarded. Names are being collected at the Student Pugwash home page: http://www.spusa.org/pugwash/pledge.html. At press time, about 1,000 names had been gathered. NO SLACKERS HERE: Student Pugwash aims to collect 1 million pledges by the year 2000, relates Sandra Ionno. During the Nobel ceremony, the names gathered to that point will be presented to Rotblat as a "positive way for young people to say: 'We're ready and willing to take responsibility for the next century,'" remarks Sandra Ionno, executive director of Student Pugwash USA. Student Pugwash's efforts are "not limited to scientists," she asserts. "We're working on the assumption that science and technology affects everyone these days. Our main emphasis is to stress individual responsibility, especially among young people."

At Mid-Decade, Forecasters Taking A Look Into Science And Technology Crystal Ball

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