Future R&D Environments A Report for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (2002) / Chapter Skim
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2 Push Factors
2 Push Factors
Pages 9-32
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From page 9... ...
in biological systems is contributing to the development of new man-made materials, which, in turn, have allowed us to grow functional biological tissues. Therefore, in considering "push" factors, the committee has focused on these three fields, identifying the subfields within each that seem particularly ripe for major advances or breakthroughs in the next decade.
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From page 10... ...
In health care, changes are afoot in diagnostics, drug design, tissue and organ growth, and artificial organs, particularly those known as hybrid organs. In agriculture, advances in the understanding of nutrition and pest control, as well as increasing concern about the environment, guide strategies for modifying organisms to increase the value of foods and to decrease the environmental insult that accompanies their growth.
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From page 11... ...
The availability of whole genome sequences has enormously increased the utility of DNA microarrays, and it is now routine to assay simultaneously the expression levels of thousands or tens of thousands of genes on a one-squarecentimeter chip and to reperform the assay several times under changed environmental conditions. Such assays (also called expression profiles)
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From page 12... ...
Individually they each produce a distinctive color emission, but if they bind, the color emission is different. Methods of detection that do not involve labeling can also be developed for high-throughput, quantitative monitoring, including surface plasmon resonance and a variant technology based on evanescent waves.
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From page 13... ...
For certain applications, such as drug targeting (see below) , proteomic technologies may eclipse genomic technologies; for other applications, such as identifying populations at risk for major diseases, genomic technologies are likely to remain important.
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It remains to be seen how strongly market forces or other stimuli will encourage companies to put more effort into using network mapping techniques to improve drug targeting beyond avoiding adverse reactions. Efforts to map inheritable gene sequence variations, called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)
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The effect of synthetic material composition, form, and surface properties on normal tissue growth is key to generating replacement tissues or guiding tissue growth in situ. Finding substrates that can adsorb macromolecules without denaturing them is a requirement for biochip development.
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The last decade has seen major advances in designing artificial pancreases that can carry out at least some functions of the liver. New materials and new understanding of mammalian cell and cell membrane phenomena should accelerate progress in this area in the next decade, and stem cell research may well provide a new, much larger source of cell material for these devices, removing what has been a significant limitation in their design thus far.
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From page 17... ...
However, it seems at best uncertain, and at worst unlikely, that the broad range of objections coming from different directions will be overcome in the next decade. Medical Devices and Instrumentation The advances in materials science and information technology that are making such a profound difference in molecular and cellular biology and tissue engineering have been equally important for the development of new, experimental measurement techniques and new medical devices.
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From page 18... ...
The next 10 years are likely to see a great proliferation of such devices. Since, in effect, they reduce the intermediation of the physician in the therapy, they introduce an interesting set of questions about how much information and what set of instructions must be programmed into a device to ensure that the "clinical decisions" the device makes match its "technical skill." At the other end of the spectrum, the introduction of electronically mediated connections between the physician and the patient using various real-time imaging techniques or using imaging and electromechanical devices to help a physician in guiding a scalpel, a laser, or a catheter means that the physical distance between physician and patient may become immaterial for many purposes.
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From page 19... ...
3MEDLINEplus, the health information Web site of the National Institutes of Health, "has extensive information from the National Institutes of Health and other trusted sources on about 500 diseases and conditions" (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/aboutmedlineplus.html)
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From page 20... ...
Some of the uses of the newly available genetic information also parallel the way the information is used in human medicine determining genetic proclivity for certain diseases, understanding the paths of action of certain diseases, and identifying the patterns of gene expression during development. But applications have gone much further in plants and animals because genetic modification has always been a major activity in agriculture to improve flavor, yield, shelf time, pest resistance, and other characteristics.
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Nanotechnology Although the term nanotechnology is relatively new, developments that have made possible products with smaller and smaller features have been under way since the concepts of microelectronics were first introduced in the early 1960s. Progressively finer-scaled microelectronic components and microelectromechanical devices have been produced using optical lithography to cut and shape superimposed layers of thin films.
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From page 22... ...
Self-assembly and controlled three-dimensional architectures will be utilized in molecular electronics, highly specific catalysts, and drug delivery systems. Quantum Dots Semiconductor nanocrystals ranging from 1 to 10 nm represent a new class of matter with unique opto-electronic and chemical properties relative to bulk and molecular regimes.
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From page 23... ...
It also seems likely that the ability to control both porosity and chemical properties will turn out to be very useful in the synthesis of perm-selective membranes in hybrid organs. · Nanotechnology has the potential to provide better surfaces or substrates in bioassays for chemical/biological reactions and for research on the organization of interconnected cells, such as neurons and the endothelial cells that line the circulatory system.
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From page 24... ...
devices, helped by fabrication techniques originally developed for the semiconductor industry. Further progress, however, will depend on solving two classes of problems: those associated with control of and communication with the devices and those related to the surface properties of the materials used in the devices.
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Because this country does not have a hydrogen distribution and storage infrastructure, at present fuel cells are fed by hydrocarbons that are transformed by a fuel processor into hydrogen gas, CO2, and CO. At temperatures less than 120 °C, the absorption of CO on the platinum catalyst is significant, and it competes with the oxidation of the hydrogen on the fuel cell anode.
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If research makes possible the operation of fuel cells (and on-site hydrogen conversion units) at costs of 0.10 per kWhr or lower, then distributed generation of electricity production will become feasible.
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Organic/Inorganic Hybrids The motivation for developing organic/inorganic hybrids is the coupling of the improved processing and superior mechanical properties of the organic material with the unique functional characteristics of the inorganic material to form the hybrid material. Semiconductor applications appear possible in which the charge transport characteristics of the inorganics (because of strong ionic and covalent intermolecular associations)
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From page 28... ...
While incremental advances in current applications can capitalize on the improved technology, the implementation of new applications, potentially possible because of hardware technology improvements, is likely to depend on improvements in software development. Historically, more than 50 percent of the cost of software development has been in testing, debugging, and quality assurance.
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From page 29... ...
The power of the computer can be used to provide a relatively simple interface to the user in spite of the underlying complexity of the system. Unless there are major advances in the design of these interfaces, commercial demand will lag the technical capacity for increased complexity or further performance breakthroughs in computers and networks.
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To the extent this occurs, the need to improve human/computer interfaces is obviated. Greatly improved technology for data transmission and storage naturally raise issues of security and authentication.
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From page 31... ...
New systems for classifying and organizing data and for creating knowledge and knowledge bases, rather than databases, are needed. Computational power has also changed the pharmaceutical industry, where for some time it has been providing support for three-dimensional modeling of molecular structures as part of the drug design process.
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From page 32... ...
However, it is not so much overwhelming computational power that is most important as it is our ever-increasing ability to miniaturize chips that have modest, but adequate, computational capacity to be usefully incorporated in implanted sensors or in MEMS devices. Intelligent sensors based on microchips are now commonplace in heart pacing and implanted defibrillation devices.
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