Rudy M. Baum
C&EN Washington

First of all, it's just a date—Jan 1, 2000. It has no cosmic significance whatsover. It does not have much historical significance, really, because it is not based on anything absolute. The date of Christ's birth is unknown, and the calendar hasn't marched through time uninterrupted for the past 2000 years. That is why the debate over when the millennium begins is so silly. It does not matter when people celebrate the millennium, because the millennium is an utterly artifical construct.

But we humans have a passion of celebrating anniversaries and other cyclical events marked by the calendar; so Jan. 1, 2000 has become an event. Because we have become, in our day-day lives, a largely secular society—in the sense that we do not look to the heavens to explain natural phenomena— most of us do not anticipate apocalyptic visitations from the gods as the millennium turns over. Instead, because we remain deeply superstitious creatures, we invented a secular apocalypse—the Y2K bug buried in the binary code that drives the personal computer that rule our lives.

I, for one, think that midnight, Jan. 1, 2000, will come and go 24 times, rolling around the world through the course of a day, and not much untoward will happen. There will be glitches here and there, of course, but there are glitches in this wired world we inhabit every day. We accept the inconveniences the glitches impose pretty much without comment.

I could be wrong, of course. I remember not too many years ago, when some of C&EN's staff began talking about using Mosaic or a gopher to explore the Internet (we weren't surfing it yet), and I dismissed it as "productivity's black hole." Today, when I turn on my PC here in C&EN's Washington offices, one of the applications that boots up automatically is Netscape, and the default home page is C&EN Online, the electronic edition of this magazine that I helped create in 1998.

Computers and the Internet are clearly one of the driving forces shaping all aspects of society at the turn of the millennium. But despite the stock market's insistence that "tech stocks" equal "computer stocks," we here at C&EN believe that chemistry in all its permutations remains a vital component of high technology. Which brings me to this "Millennium Special Report: Chemistry In The Service Of Humanity."

The pace of change in today's world is truly incomprehensible. Science is advancing on all fronts, particularly chemistry and biology working together as they never have before to understand life in general and human beings in particular at a breathtaking pace. Technology ranging from computers and the Internet to medical devices to genetic engineering to nanotechnology is transforming our world and our existence in it. It is, in fact, a fool's mission to predict where science and technology will take us in the coming decade, let alone the coming century. We can say with finality only this: We don't know.

We do know, however, that we face enormous challenges, we 6 billion humans who now inhabit Earth. In its 1998 revision of world population estimates and projections, the United Nations anticipates a world population in 2050 of 7.3 billion to 10.7 billion, with a "medium-fertility projection," considered the most likely, indicating a world population of 8.9 billion people in 2050. According to the UN, fertility now stands at 2.7 births per woman, down from 5 births per woman in the early 1950s. And fertility rates are declining in all regions of the world. That's good news.

But people are living a lot longer. That is certainly good news for the individuals who are living longer, but it also poses challenges for health care and social services the world over. The 1998 UN report estimates for the first time the number of octogenarians, nonagenarians, and centenarians living today and projected for 2050. The numbers are startling. In 1998, 66 million people were aged 80 or older, about one of every 100 persons. That number is expected to increase sixfold by 2050 to reach 370 million people, or one in every 24 persons. By 2050, more than 2.2 million people will be 100 years old or older!

Here is the fundamental challenge we face: The world's growing and aging population must be fed and clothed and housed and transported in ways that do not perpetuate the environmental devastation wrought by the first waves of industrialization of the 19th and 20th centuries. As we increase our output of goods and services, as we increase our consumption of energy, as we meet the imperative of raising the standard of living for the poorest among us, we must learn to carry out our economic activities sustainably.

There are optimists out there, C&EN readers among them, who believe that the history of civilization is a long string of technological triumphs of humans over the limits of nature. In this view, the idea of a "carrying capacity" for Earth—a limit to the number of humans Earth's resources can support—is a fiction because technological advances will continuously obviate previously perceived limits. This view has historical merit. Dire predictions made in the 1960s about the exhaustion of resources ranging from petroleum to chromium to fresh water by the end of the 1980s or 1990s have proven utterly wrong.

While I do not count myself as one of the technological pessimists who see technology as a mixed blessing at best and an unmitigated evil at worst, I do not count myself among the technological optimists either. There are environmental challenges of transcendent complexity that I fear may overcome us and our Earth before technological progress can come to our rescue. Global climate change, the accelerating destruction of terrestrial and oceanic habitats, the catastrophic loss of species across the plant and animal kingdoms—these are problems that are not obviously amenable to straightforward technological solutions.

But I know this, too: Science and technology have brought us to where we are, and only science and technology, coupled with innovative social and economic thinking, can take us to where we need to be in the coming millennium.

Chemists, chemistry, and the chemical industry—what we at C&EN call the chemical enterprise—will play central roles in addressing these challenges. The first section of this Special Report is a series called "Millennial Musings" in which a wide variety of representatives from the chemical enterprise share their thoughts about the future of our science and industry.

The five essays that follow explore the contributions the chemical enterprise is making right now to ensure that we will successfully meet the challenges of the 21st century. The essays do not attempt to predict the future. Taken as a whole, they do not pretend to be a comprehensive examination of the efforts of our science and our industry to tackle the challenges I've outlined above. Rather, they paint, in broad brush strokes, a portrait of scientists, engineers, and business managers struggling to make a vital contribution to humanity's future.

The first essay, by Senior Editor Marc S. Reisch, is a case study of the chemical industry's ongoing transformation to sustainable production. Although it is not well known to the general public, the chemical industry is at the forefront of corporate efforts to reduce waste from production streams to zero. Industry giants DuPont and Dow Chemical are taking major strides worldwide to manufacture chemicals while minimizing the environmental "footprint" of their facilities.

This is an ethic that starts at the top of corporate structure. Indeed, Reisch quotes Dow President and Chief Executive Officer William S. Stavropolous: "We must integrate elements that historically have been seen as at odds with one another: the triple bottom line of sustainability—economic and social and environmental needs." DuPont Chairman and CEO Charles (Chad) O. Holliday envisions a future in which "biological processes use renewable resources as feedstocks, use solar energy to drive growth, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, use low-temperature and low-pressure processes, and produce waste that is less toxic." But sustainability is more than just a philosophy at these two chemical companies. Reisch describes ongoing Dow and DuPont initiatives that are making sustainability a reality at Dow facilities in Michigan and Germany and at DuPont's massive plant site near Richmond, Va.

Another manifestation of the chemical industry's evolution is its embrace of life sciences. Genetic engineering is a revolutionary technology. In the 1970s, research advances fundamentally shifted our perception of DNA. While it had always been clear that deoxyribonucleic acid was a chemical, it was not a chemical that could be manipulated like other chemicals—clipped precisely, altered, stitched back together again into a functioning molecule. Recombinant DNA techniques began the transformation of DNA into just such a chemical, and the reverberations of that change are likely to be felt well into the next century.

Genetic engineering has entered the fabric of modern science and technology. It is one of the basic tools chemists and biologists use to understand life at the molecular level. It provides new avenues to pharmaceuticals and new approaches to treat disease. It expands enormously agronomists' ability to introduce traits into crops, a capability seized on by numerous chemical companies. There is no doubt that this powerful new tool will play a major role in feeding the world's population in the coming century, but its adoption has hit some bumps in the road. In the second essay, Editor-at-Large Michael Heylin examines how the promise of agricultural biotechnology has gotten tangled up in real public fear of genetic manipulation and corporate control over food.

The third essay, by Senior Editor Mairin B. Brennan, looks at chemists embarking on what is perhaps the greatest intellectual quest in the history of science—humans' attempt to understand the detailed chemistry of the human brain, and with it, human consciousness. While this quest is, at one level, basic research at its most pure, it also has enormous practical significance. Brennan focuses on one such practical aspect: the effort to understand neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease that predominantly plague older humans and are likely to become increasingly difficult public health problems among an aging population.

Science and technology are always two-edged swords. They bestow the power to create and the power to destroy. In addition to its enormous potential for health and agriculture, genetic engineering conceivably could be used to create horrific biological warfare agents. In the fourth essay of this Millennium Special Report, Senior Correspondent Lois R. Ember examines the challenge of developing methods to counter the threat of such biological weapons. "Science and technology will eventually produce sensors able to detect the presence or release of biological agents, or devices that aid in forecasting, remediating, and ameliorating bioattacks," Ember writes.

Finally, Contributing Editor Wil Lepkowski discusses the most mundane, the most marvelous, and the most essential molecule on Earth, H₂O. Providing clean water to Earth's population is already difficult—and tragically, not always accomplished. Lepkowski looks in depth at the situation in Bangladesh—where a well-meaning UN program to deliver clean water from wells has poisoned millions with arsenic. Chemists are working to develop better ways to detect arsenic in drinking water at meaningful concentrations and ways to remove it that will work in a poor, developing country. And he explores the evolving water management philosophy, and the science that underpins it, that will be needed to provide adequate water for all its vital uses.

In the past two centuries, our science has transformed the world. Chemistry is a wondrous tool that has allowed us to understand the structure of matter and gives us the ability to manipulate that structure to suit our own purposes. It allows us to dissect the molecules of life to see what makes them, and us, tick. It is providing a glimpse into workings of what may be the most complex structure in the universe, the human brain, and with it hints about what constitutes consciousness. In the coming decades, we will use chemistry to delve ever deeper into these mysteries and provide for humanity's basic and not-so-basic needs.

Thanks for reading. Happy New Year.

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