Human Mind Will Be a Fresh Frontier for Study in ‘90s

You can generally divide New Year’s revelers into three groups: Those who look forward, those who look back and those who are sick of seeing “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But new years always prompt George Bailey-esque introspections.

Knowing what you know now, if you could go back and restart your career, what would you do? What field would you explore?

I asked this question of several distinguished scientists and engineers--people who are absolutely tops in their fields. These folks have been around the block a few times and know the difference between real results and surreal hype. The answers reveal as much about who they are as where innovation will come from over the next decade.

- Robert Lucky, executive director of research at AT&T; Bell Labs:

“I wouldn’t go into materials science; you’d have to get your hands dirty. Anything that verges on chemistry is too muddy for me. I think computer science with a bent toward hardware and architecture. That’s where the action is going to be for the next decade--particularly in the man-machine interface. Computers are still fun. Going into the neural network field would be the funnest--but I’m not sure if it would contribute the most. Reverse-engineering people--taking people apart and figuring out how they work--is what always interested me.”

- Erich Bloch, director of the National Science Foundation:

“I sure wouldn’t pick the one that I picked, which at that time was a revolutionary field named computers and semiconductors. Now I’d pick molecular biology and biotechnology for the same reasons. It’s on the verge of being an even more exciting field.”

- Ralph Gomory, president of the Sloan Foundation and former senior vice president for science and technology at International Business Machines:

“Artificial intelligence in all its possible ramifications. I think computers and computer science are at the very beginning of achieving their potential.”

- Arthur Kornberg, 1959 Nobel laureate in medicine and emeritus professor of biochemistry at Stanford University:

“Nucleic acid-protein interactions. I would want to be more involved in structural chemistry; knowing the three dimensional structure of large molecules in greater detail--like enzymes, organelles, nucleic acids and proteins. Basically, correlating structure with function of macromolecules.”

- Marvin Minsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and father of artificial intelligence:

“Mathematics--topology, to be precise. Because that’s where you learn how to create theory. It’s pure thinking. And you don’t have to learn or remember an empirical database that will be obsolete or inaccurate. Why take that risk? Only the great mathematics survives, and it provides an excellent base for looking into whatever else interests you. . . . No, I didn’t know this at the time.”

- James D. Watson, 1962 Nobel laureate in medicine and co-discoverer of the double helix:

“If I were young, 23 or 24, I’d probably go into computational neurobiology. There’s a good amount of exciting work there and someone with energy and intelligence can make their mark. A decade ago, there wasn’t much of a scientific base, but now there is. It’s also easy to get people excited about learning how the brain works. That’s important in an emerging field.”

- Ian M. Ross, president of AT&T; Bell Laboratories:

“My education and early career were focused on what I believed would be an area of explosive growth: research in semiconductor, or microchip, technology. That technology has become pervasive.

“For those entering scientific careers today, I see similar potential in genetic research and genetic engineering, with the possibility of providing an abundant food supply, cleaning up the environment, producing efficient and non-polluting energy and in the prevention or cure of many diseases.”

- Stephen Lukasik, vice president and chief scientist at Northrop and former director of the Defense Department’s advanced projects agency:

“Computational physics and molecular biology. I would again major in physics and then I would do my graduate work not in the physical acoustics work that I did but in molecular biology; I think that’s where the big action is.”

- John Seely Brown, vice president and director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center:

“Computational pragmatics. I think we’re going to see a complete new understanding of how the human mind works; most of our cognitive models have been too solipsistic. We’ve worshiped conceptual knowledge at the expense of understanding what makes humans human--the ability to make sense of the environment around them. We’re going to find a more interesting continuum between the individual mind and the organizational mind. Computers will be the medium for this.”

- Simon Ramo, co-founder of TRW:

“Biocomputers. Reproducing the relationships between the brain and the senses not in silicon and semiconductors but by biochemical ingredients. We know a lot about individual neurons but we don’t know how to wire them up. As long as we’re going to engineer organic molecules, we might as well engineer the interconnections. These neural networks hold a lot of potential. I’d be intrigued by that frontier field; I’d begin to theorize about it; I’d be out soliciting funds and I’d hope to get somewhere in 10 years.”

- Donald Fredrickson, former director of National Institutes of Health:

“I’d certainly go back into biology; we haven’t begun to see the limits of the horizon of biology. We’ve had marvelous success with the reductionalist approach of molecular biology but it’s now time to resynthesize all the bits that the molecular people have thrown out. We have to take all this new information and create a new hierarchy of ideas to explain how the total organism works. We’ve done a great job of taking the clock apart; the real fun will be to put it all back together again.”

Clearly, the inner beyonds of brain, mind and biology are the new frontiers for these old-timers. The consensus is that technology will further redefine the links between inorganic matter and life itself. What’s striking is that, for all the intellectual curiosity they possess, they’re less interested in questions on the periphery than being at the white-hot center of “where the action is.” They want to have an impact.

If you had to bet on where the most excitement--and most interesting innovations--are going to materialize over the next decade, then these are the people who know the odds. If they’re on target, the next decade could be even more provocative than the last.