Disciplines emergence

L. E. Scriven That s a recommendation I d second. But there s much more to the story than that history tells. Elsewhere in these proceedings I try to sketch how our profession and our discipline emerged and evolved. My view of more recent evolution was printed in Chemical Engineering Progress in December 1987. 

In the last two decades, industrial biotechnology reported an impressive increase and several sub-disciplines emerged within this field. The US Department of Energy [11] has estimated the biotech market of small molecules to reach US 100 billion by 2010 and US 400 billion by 2030. Furthermore, a popular report from McKinsey Co. [12] forecasted a production of chemicals through biotech to represent up to 20% of the total chemical market by 2020. 

In this introductory chapter, I shall focus on the institutional beginnings of materials science, and materials engineering as well indeed, MSE became an accepted abbreviation at quite an early stage. Following an examination, in Chapter 2, of the earlier emergence of some related disciplines, the intellectual antecedents to and development of materials science in its early stages are treated in Chapter 3. The field made its first appearance in USA, and for a number of years developed only in that country. Its development elsewhere was delayed by at least a decade. 

This entire book is about the emergence, nature and cultivation of a new discipline, materials science and engineering. To draw together the strings of this story, it helps to be clear about what a scientific discipline actually is that, in turn, becomes clearer if one looks at the emergence of some earlier disciplines which have had more time to reach a condition of maturity. Comparisons can help in definition we can narrow a vague concept by examining what apparently diverse examples have in common. 

Both of these crucial fields of research will surface repeatedly later in this book here they are briefly discussed only as fields which by at least one of the criteria I have examined do not appear to qualify as fully blown disciplines. Both have emerged only in this century, because a knowledge of crystal structure is indispensable to both and that only emerged after 1912, when X-ray diflfraction from crystals was discovered. 

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