*Agenda for the next millenium Interview with Prof MGK Menon, Renowned scientist (courtesy IGNOU)

In this interview Prof Menon' speaks on IT technology, the convergence of technologies, advances in Chemisty, Physics, Biology etc

Q: Prof Menon, could you tell us about your vision for Science and Technology as it enters into the next millenium?

Prof Menon: Well, when we talk of a vision for science and technology into next millenium, we should fist of all ask ourselves where we stand in this area, where is science and technology today? Let us not minimise what happened in earlier priods of human history. In many great centres of human civilisations such as China and India, the valleys of Europe, the Mediterrean cultures, in greece and Rome and indeed in the America and perhaps in Africa which I don't know much. But they were not self sustaining growth patterns.

What has happend over the past few hundred years since the scientific and industrial revolutions took place in Europe is a self sustaining exponential growth of science and technology.

This is still continuing and science and technology are moving ahead presently at a very rapid pace. There are many important characteristics and these characteristics are that there is an increasing interaction between science and technology. The advance of science is getting immediately into technology, into production, engineering, agriculture, medicine and the like. Equally all of the technological advances support a scientific endeavur enabling to move ahead much faster. This is perhaps the most important characteristic. Secondly it is not s though advances are taking place in some individual area or discipline. They are taking place in Mathematics and Physics , Chemistry, Biology, Agriculture and Medicine.There are many new areas in industry like Information technology, Bio technology and the like. Advances are taking place on many many fronts. If something important is done in Mathematics it gets immediately reflected into advances in physics, chemistry and the like. Therefore we see that not only is science is advanceing fast and that there is the symbiotic relationship between science and technology, but alsot that new disciplines are growing and emerging. For example no we really think of the earth system, not geology of the solid earth but of meteorology, oceanography and the total aspects relating to the biosphere. All integrated together as the physiology of the earth system.

The advances are taking place more in the developed nations and not so much in the developing countries. Therefore when we look at what is going to happen, a vision for science and technology into the next milleneium, I think we should just talk of the next century and I am not a prophet to give you what discoveries will take place. I can only talk of the trends, the visio as you call it.

First of all its very clear that the advances of science and technology will continue very rapidly as it has been and even more so. Second, because of theire interplay betwen S&T all of this will get reflected into products, into processes which will affect the human society in a very intimate way. Today we know that wehen we look from a distance space as the astranaut does at planet earth, you don't see the boundaries of nations, you don't see the artificial divisions bases on castes, communities, nationalities and religion. We know for instance that what we do in India affects US in terms of what happpens in the atmosphere; carbon dioxie depletion for example. The atmosphere belongs to the whole globe and so aon. We see all of this. In addition information technologies are moving ahead in a way in which the concept of the independence of the global village of every human being able to communicate with every other human being is coming about.

If I think of future, there are many advances that are certainly going to take place. Information technology is going to advance tremendously, its going to advance through convergence of every way by which information is dealth with. In its storage, the way it is accessed, the way it can be communicated and transferred, the way it can be acted upon and the way information becomes a baisc resource. It becomes a knowledge base from which all other developments will take place. It's already clear that the advances of modern biology relating to all other fileds of genetics in deciphering the umean gene and the like would never have come about except for tha automatic system that have come in and the enormous capabilities of computing that have become available. Thus apart from other developments in Physics and Chemistry, it is also clear that Information technology will grow which will see the convergence of vocie, the video, of the text, of radio broadcasting, of the fax mechine, television,of the fax machine, of the computer, of the television broadcasitng, of the set top boxes, wires, of optical fibre cable systems of space commmucation systems etc. All of these are converging so that you have a mix of capabilities of technology, of access routers . You are not restricted and this will enable the global village. In India the Information technology will transform the whole country side and rural areas in every sense of the wordl. It can be used powerfully for education, for transparency, preventing governance for being a bureacratic top down system and the like. Everything is going to be miniaturiesd, become very small . Computers will become smaller and smaller. There is going to be nano technology which means dealing with dimensions which are of the order of nanometers. One is familiar with the meter, centimeter, with thousandth of a meter, millionth of the meter, and with thousand of a milllionth of a meter which is nano meter. We will be dealing with its production processess.

We will get into new areas of chemistry. There will be the chemistry not just based on the materials of tapes or elements which we see on earth and some of the things which we were able to produce which are referred to as Transonic elements. We will see the creation of not only stable materials but meta stable materislas which have existence for limited periods.

There is going to be a major transformation in Biology. It has enabled us to move from the double ED structure of the DNA and structures of very large biological molecules to essentially the gene, the genetic code and to be able to perform the gene tranfers to do genetic engineering, increasing the pace of immunology, industrial biotechnology and so on.