California Ranked No. 1 in Innovation
Maybe not every important new idea begins in California, but a new survey by Science Digest magazine suggests that a great many certainly do get their start there.
Polling more than 1,200 corporations, universities and colleges, scientific and engineering associations and societies, nonprofit institutions with large research and development programs and most of the government agencies and laboratories involved in research and development, the magazine selected what it deemed “the year’s top 100 innovations, and the men and women behind them.”
Top Three States
Out of 27 states, plus the District of Columbia, reflected in the final findings, 20 of the 100 innovations claimed California as their place of origin. New York was second with 13, followed by Pennsylvania with 10.
Of the 20 California innovators, seven were from the Los Angeles area, reflecting such institutions as Caltech, TRW Electronics Systems Group, the Naval Oceans Systems Center at San Diego, Adept Technology of Hacienda Heights, Memorial Medical Center of Long Beach and UCLA.
Oliver S. Moore III, editor of Science Digest, said the preponderance of Californians reflected in the study was in no way surprising.
“Easterners tend to take a very provincial point of view,” Moore said, “but California has had an investment in the public school system that goes back well into the postwar period.”
In California, Moore said, “there really has been a major commitment to higher education over a long period of time, and it’s paid off.
“What happens,” Moore went on, “is that high technology tends to cluster around centers of higher learning. What you’ve got out in California is all of the aerospace, all the Silicon Valley, plus all the high-energy centers that clump around Livermore. Those are some very powerful magnets for high technology.”
Added Moore: “It’s a fact of life that the cutting edge of high technology is out there.”
Moore said California’s dominance of the top innovations also failed to amaze him in light of a similar study last year on the “100 brightest scientists under 40.”
Said Moore: “It turned out that the largest number of those were from California--a total of 31 out of 100.”
‘Not an Aberration’
Having encountered such findings “two years in a row,” Moore said, “it’s quite clear this is not an aberration.”
Moore stopped short of attributing California’s scientific luminosity to the legendary climate and laid-back atmosphere of the Golden State. On the other hand, he conceded that California’s openness to new ideas and alternative life styles was probably no obstacle to creativity, discovery and scientific innovation.
“On the silly side,” Moore said, “you see hot tubs, things like that. California has been the land of the fad and the pop life style. But at the same time, that type of easy acceptance of new life styles also has to do with easy acceptance of new ideas. And I don’t think you can be an innovative mind without being iconoclastic.”
But Caltech professor of computer sciences Charles Seitz, creator of a prototype computer known as the Cosmic Cube, was more inclined to agree with Moore’s earlier hypothesis, suggesting that the “intellectual concentration” of the major institutions in California was as much responsible for the state’s lead in the innovations front as anything.
Parallel Processing
His own device, Seitz explained, promises a “concurrent” computer that allows for multiple activities on the part of the machine. In addition, Seitz’s Cosmic Cube greatly speeds computing time. Said Seitz: “The real driving force behind this is the greed for speed. It gets real boring having to wait all night for sequential data.”
Helen Howard, the chief researcher on the poll, said the survey had sought to identify “any innovations that had been announced since January of 1985.” She said Science Digest had defined an “innovation” as “any product, process, technique, algorithm (a process for problem-solving applied primarily to the realm of the computer) or system that is new, that has never been done before.”
These breakthrough technologies include a robot arm to perform precise brain surgery, a new unmanned submarine to speed search-and-rescue operations and a machine vision system that teaches robots to see objects more clearly. Another of the innovations, something called the Plasma Beat Wave Accelerator, is designed to simulate the birth of the universe and thus aid in understanding the basic structure of matter. That device was pioneered by UCLA’s John W. Dawson.
‘Artificial Bone’
Yet another innovation, created by Dr. Jacob S. Hanker of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a kind of “artificial bone,” a biocompatible substance that will make it possible to replace bone tissue.
As Moore said of those responsible for these innovations, “These really are the people who are going to change the world. They certainly will be the problem solvers. They will solve major medical problems, for example. This is a group that will probably solve cancer.”
The outcome of the work undertaken by these innovators, Moore said, has “real, incredible implications for the quality of life on this planet.
“It’s easy to lapse into superlatives,” Moore said. “But the reality is that these are not ivory-tower thinkers. These are people who will impact the way we live, work and play.”
