Ingenieria Quimica Visiones

Chemical Engineering: Visions of the World R.C. Darton, R.G.H. Prince and D.G. Wood (Editors) © 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved
Chapter 1
Opening Address Chemical Engineering and Tomorrow's World
Lord May
Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford 0X13PS, United Kingdom
This essay set outs some speculations about the changing role of Chemical Engineering in the 21stcentury. To this end, I first look back well beyond my own undergraduate experiences of Chemical Engineering at Sydney University in the 1950's to the earlier shape and traditions of the subject. I then sketch a personal vision of how ever-accelerating advances in our understanding of the molecular machinery of life, and the consequent biotechnological applications, are likely to affect us,bringing both new benefits and new problems. Chemical Engineering, defined more broadly than most current practitioners can imagine and shading into biomedicine, will be at the heart of delivering the benefits. and caught up in most of the problems. Specifically, I will touch on: implications for curricula, and the linked question of attracting adequate numbers of able students; patterns ofpartnership between academia and industry; questions of intellectual property, and what should and should not be patentable. I will conclude with thoughts about the interplay between science/engineering and society.
1. Changing patterns in the definition of a discipline
Later in this volume, John Perkins gives an excellent account of the history of "the first 100 years'' of Chemical Engineering, andUtz-HellmuthFelcht discusses the more recent past. I would chauvinistically claim for Chemical Engineering the credit, in the mid-19th century, for the first foreshadowing in the synthetic production of dyes and other chemicals, mainly in Germany of today's vast and varied enterprise of organised research. One conspicuous difference between those early times and today is often overlooked in suchnarrative histories. It is the earlier relative

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Lord May
lack of narrow specialisation and, more significantly, of the individual practitioners' sense of being specialists. This difference reaches well beyond Chemical Engineering itself. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the creators of the Industrial Revolution, whether individuals like Wedgwood, Pasteur, Faraday or Armstrong, or smallgroups like Erasmus Darwin's Lichfield "lunaticks", or indeed the Royal Society's members collectively, had interests which reached from basic science through engineering applications to commercial exploitation. Today's discussions, in the UK and elsewhere, of the need to make schoolchildren more clearly aware of the gulf between "science" and "engineering" would, I think, have struck these earlierpeople as incomprehensible. One striking illustration in support of this view comes from the iconic statues placed at the high flood of Victorian confidence on the Holborn viaduct (a bridge over a sunken road beneath which the tamed Fleet River flows invisibly) in London. Four statues symbolise the bases of prosperity: Commerce, Science, Agriculture, Fine Arts. Each holds a representative object.And what is this canonical symbol of "science" to Victorian eyes? Watt's governor (which today many would not only relegate to "engineering", but to its lower social strata as a regulatory device of steam train engines and other machines).
It is, of course, easy to argue that our hugely expanded body of knowledge has made ever-narrower specialisation inevitable. There is much truth in this. Butif this is all there is to it, then the future is ever more fragmented partitioning into sub-disciplines; further proliferation of departments, programmes, and professional societies. The implications for curricula are bad enough. But the implications for the dialogue between science/engineering/technology and the many publics to which it increasingly must relate are worse.
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