Co-Organizers: Hyungsub Choi, Chemical Heritage Foundation and Ann Johnson, University of South Carolina
Session Chair: Hyungsub Choi, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Panelists: Ann Johnson, University of South Carolina, Department of History; Patrick McCray, University of California at Santa Barbara, Department of History; Cyrus Mody, Rice University, Department of History; Joseph November, University of South Carolina, Department of History

This panel offers four papers that all look at the role of futurists in developing and promoting new technologies. These futurists are in same cases scientific or technological practitioners, in other cases policy makers, and in still others they are cultural commentators, such as science fiction authors. While futuristic visions obviously look forward, it is also crucial to examine them in their own historical contexts. These four papers present a diverse set of post-WWII historical episodes in which visions of the future played a significant role in driving technological development in a variety of different ways, from the effect visions have on whether research results are accepted to the allocation of funds to a particular technological development. In addition to the focus on futurism, these four papers have another point of connection. Each of the four also examines a particular historical root of nanotechnology, which as much as any other family of technologies, has been driven by claims of futuristic transformations. In the end, of course, futuristic visions do not predict the future, but we all argue in our papers here that knowing the history of these visions can tell us a great deal about the past and the present.

We believe that this panel will illuminate the question of how the history of technology’s context has changed by exploring the way futurist visions draw on history and how the means of that drawing has changed between the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. Drawing on John Gaddis’s claims about the role of history in predicting the future in his recent short book The Landscape of History, these papers examine a neglected historical question—how the past shapes our visions of the future and what this nexus means for the development of technology.

Joseph November’s “Towards Bioengineering: Computerization and Futurism at the NIH” looks at the way futurist visions played out in the National Institutes of Health of the 1960s, in terms of the development and uptake of computers into medicine and medical research. November also examines the striking overlap of both personnel and rhetoric between the NIH’s 1960s computerization programs and the NIH’s present-day ventures into nanotechnology.

Cyrus Mody’s “Crazy or Brilliant or . . .? Molecular Electronics and the Interpretive Flexibility of Personality” looks at the question how futurist visions can effect the technical credibility of their authors. Mody’s paper looks at several different scientists and engineers to determine how their visions fit into the acceptance of their work by their peers at different developmental stages.

Patrick McCray’s, “Reconverging Technologies: Space, Nano and the Fountains of Paradise” focuses on the case of the Space Elevator, which was a centerpiece of science fiction author, Arthur C. Clarke’s, Fountains of Paradise.” This paper explores the articulation between futurist visions of nanotechnology and space through plans, some more speculative than others, of a space elevator.

Ann Johnson’s “From Here to 2020: Policy Makers’ Visions of the Future” looks at current nanotechnology roadmaps and shows that their visions of the future of science and engineering are closely constrained by a historically particular, normative vision of the way post-Cold War science and technologies develop and how technologies interface and ostensibly ‘drive’ national economies, which connects futuristic technology policy and economic forecasting in interesting ways.