Sorting future trends

An example of a future trend is already well underway. Increasingly, the traditional question, palatable or unpalatable will be supplemented or supplanted by chemical characterization of the toxin and quantitative estimates of the amount present. Many of the puzzling cases that we are presented with today may be resolved with good data of this sort. And, increasingly, the data must represent statistically sound and geographically representative samples. 

This section may be considered as a sort of epilogue. We attempt here to summarize briefly the present trends that permit deduction of a further development in the near future. At present it is certainly not necessary to advocate the utility of ab initio calculations, but still it is useful to recall a tremendous progress made from the early sixties. In the Introduction we quoted a paper by Allen and Karo reviewing the ab initio calculations reported in the literature up to 1960. The largest among the systems treated was the 18-electron molecule SiH, Approximately a decade later It was possible to perform an... 

Lastly, I hope that the future will see a continuation of the current trend in the philosophy of the discipline. Too often in the past mimicry was viewed by those outside the discipline as a gee whiz sort of sideshow that said that earthworms must mimic beets because both live in the soil and both are dark red To be sure, there was some of this in the past, but it should not have been allowed to overshadow the excellent work that has been done in the field and the laboratory. If the next twenty years bring about as many advances as the last twenty, we may enter the new century without worry in this regard. I believe we will. 

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