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COMMENTARY

Materials science:
a field about to explode?
BERNADETTE BENSAUDE-VINCENT* is at the Dpartement de Philosophie, Universit Paris X, 92001 Nanterre, France.
*e-mail: bernadette.bensaude-vincent@u-paris10.fr

ARNE HESSENBRUCH is in the Science, Technology, and Society Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.

Older, established disciplines, such as physics and chemistry,

cover clearly identifiable fields. Is materials science a similarly
coherent discipline, or is it rather an expedient and ephemeral
label? And should materials science departments define a
stable curriculum, or instead adapt and readapt to an ever-
changing market?

M
aterials science has often been described as
a maturing discipline.As Robert Cahn
rightly pointed out1,2,materials science
emerged from metallurgy and solid-state
physics,which focused on structure-
sensitive properties. However,an outsiders
perspective more attentive to local traditions,
institutional settings and political contexts suggests
a very different picture.
Although materials science nucleated around
departments of metallurgy, mining and engineering in a
variety of academic institutions, the plural entity
materialsfirst appeared in the language of science
policy makers during the Cold War, in the context of a
perceived limit on advances in space and military
technologies.Whereas during the Second World War,
critical needs were still addressed in terms of one
strategic material,the idea emerged during the Cold War
that all materials were strategic. In the US, the
Department of Defense created the academic entity
Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) through its
Advanced Research Project Agency by generously
sponsoring interdisciplinary laboratories in a number
of universities.
By contrast, materials research in many other
countries is carried out in departments with other
names. In the early 1960s, more than a dozen Materials
departments were established at US universities, but
none were created in Japan until the 1980s. In Europe,
Performance Figure 1 Merton C. Flemingss
tetrahedron, emphasizing
the mutuality of
performance, process,
Properties structure and properties.
Process
Structure
a number of metallurgy departments were renamed in
the early 1960s. However, these early European attempts
to establish materials science as an academic discipline
remained isolated, lacking the large coherent
programme launched under federal auspices in the
USA.A large amount of research in Europe on
electronic and magnetic materials, and advanced
materials for batteries, were and still are
conducted under the umbrella of physics or within
solid-state-chemistry departments. Such national
differences may sometimes be accounted for in terms of
time lag.As long as the US was considered as the centre
of scientific innovation, peripheral countries would
have to follow their model in order to gradually catch up
with the leader.

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But not everyone agrees that mimicking the US is in
all respects a good idea. French scientists, in particular,
disagreed with the American model, and deliberately
tried to promote an alternative research organization
(see, for example, refs 3, 4). In their view, materials is
merely a buzzword, to be used primarily in the race for
funds and of much less use as a guide to the intellectual
content of a research topic. In general, the
centreperiphery perspective seems less appropriate
when the purpose is to arrive at knowledge of use in
specific, industrial contexts, rather than to arrive at a
grand theory.Although aspects of MSE originating in
the US have indeed been adopted elsewhere, this was
done by individuals who selectively picked what was of
use for their local purposes; they did not copy wholesale.
Japan, for instance, had no military or aerospace
programme. Demand came only from the private
sector, and companies tended to hire people trained in
their specific domain of production rather than
generalists in all materials. In the 1990s, the European
Commission supported academic interdisciplinary
materials programmes like MSE, but it encouraged the
crossing of disciplinary boundaries by subsidizing joint
research projects rather than by implementing
permanent interdisciplinary laboratories. This fact
allows us to address the question of whether a generic
materials perspective came into being because of
the development of scientific concepts equally
applicable to metals, ceramics and semiconductors, or
because of the context of the US federal governments
generous funding of academic research in the 1960s.
The European case would seem to show that the
funding structures matter more. Hence, no place is
central countries dont lead or lag.
Owing to the oil crisis in the 1970s,US science policy
shifted from military applications to civil applications.
Although economic competition with Japan became the
major concern,a second political measure boosted MSE
in the USA.The BayhDole Patent Act made it profitable
for academic institutions to pursue patents,and
encouraged researchers with governmental contracts to
Box 1: The MRS
The MRS was founded in 1973, and now consists of more than 12,600 members
from the US alone, as well as members from over 50 other countries. It is a not-for-
profit organization that brings together scientists and engineers from industry,
government and academia to share information from the research and
development of new materials of technological importance. The MRS encourages
communication and technical information exchange across the different fields of
science that affect materials, and sponsors two major annual meetings offering
approximately 75 topical symposia. There are several publications from the MRS,
including symposium proceedings, MRS Bulletin and the Journal of Materials
Research; it also produces databases and videotapes related to current research
activities. The Society works closely with other materials organizations around the
world, and is an Adhering Body of the International Union of Materials Research
Societies (IUMRS).
Websites:
MRS; www.mrs.org
IUMRS; www.iumrs.org
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2004 Nature Publishing Group
commercialize their inventions.Thus,after the blurring
of disciplinary boundaries in the 1960s,the boundary
between academia and business also became blurred,
especially in the 1980s,when many scientists who had
been working in industrial laboratories moved to
academic positions.
The intermingling of science and industry has had a
strong impact on the discipline of MSE. The first
generation of materials scientists only focused on the
relation between structure and properties. But in the
1980s, materials processing became a major concern.
At this stage, the chemical industry played a leading role
in shaping the identity of materials science, in a
comparable fashion to the role played by metallurgy in
the earlier period. Organic chemists pioneered the age
of materials by design. Instead of supplying
commodities of general use to a large customer
base, they designed composites for specific purposes.
These materials by designrequired cooperation
between customers and suppliers. This approach differs
conspicuously from the linear model (given a set of
functions, find the properties required, and then design
the material combining them); instead, it resembles the
systems approach. Such materials call for an integrated
approach, with continuous feedback between the
various specialists involved in design. In order to
visualize the interaction of structure, properties,
performance and process and thus initiate students
to a materials way of thinking Merton C. Flemings
proposed a tetrahedron5 (Fig. 1) with structure,
properties, performance and process at the four
vertices, to emphasize their mutuality: for example,
processing affects a materials performance, but the
required performance often determines the processing
used; processing affects structure, but structure
determines what type of processing is chosen, and so on.
Being applicable to all kinds of materials, from cement
to nanotubes, the tetrahedron encouraged a generic
perspective5. Since 1989, it has been used frequently in
both research reports and textbooks.
By the 1990s, the field that nucleated around the
relation between structure and properties in the 1960s
had been transmuted into a teachable discipline with a
strong conceptual basis and a specific way of thinking.
Materials research went through the standard process of
discipline formation, involving the creation of journals
and learned societies; for example, the Materials
Research Society (MRS; Box 1) in 1973, and the
European MRS (E-MRS)6 in 1983. There is now a host
of materials societies in Australia, Japan and China, and
dozens of journals publicizing materials research.
However, four decades after the foundation of the
earliest materials departments, and despite the
proliferation of materials centres and teaching
programmes, there is no evidence that materials science
is reaching the stable state of a maturediscipline.
On the contrary, its rapid expansion may be at the cost
of its coherence.Although academic departments do
need to define a curriculum, the tremendous success of
the MRS meetings does not necessarily mean that the
thousands of participants form a community, with the
same background and having the same interests.
The growing attendance at the MRS meetings was
encouraged by the proliferation of simultaneous topical
symposia, a formula that proved crucial to the success of
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the biannual meetings. The structure of the MRS is such
as to define early what topics are hotand will attract
many participants at the meetings. Obviously, the
constant search for novel themes for symposia
counteracts the attempt to define a stable core
curriculum. This is not to say that the MRS simply has a
centrifugal effect; many of the symposia are integrated,
such as interfaces, thin films, mechanics and fractures,
phase transformation and formation, structures and
states of matter. These are common to various families
of materials, and directly generated by the inner
dynamics of materials research. However, they are no
more than niches within the vast field of materials
research.A general survey of groupings of MRS
symposia from 1982 to 2002 shows that semiconductors
and materials for electronics largely dominate.
These functional materials are the only element of
stability in an ever-changing field.Although we lack
data about the numbers attending the various
symposia, we conclude that the generic perspective
embodied in Flemingss tetrahedron seems to have had
a limited impact on the work of materials scientists and
engineers: the same people may well meet year after year
and talk to each other in the same symposia (on
semiconductors or ion beam techniques, for example),
while ignoring the rest of the MRS landscape.
Among the themes transcending the various
categories of materials, nanoscience has recently
emerged as a fulcrum of science policy. Nanoscale
science could reinforce the coherence and vitality of
MSE for a number of reasons: (1) it is a generic concept
that helps to break from materials specificity; (2) almost
all sorts of materials can be nanostructured; (3)
nanoscale research is as interdisciplinary as MSE, and
also develops across the border between science and
technology; (4) like MSE, instrumentation has had a
large effect on nanoscience; and (5) nanoscience and
MSE increasingly use biomimetic strategies of
synthesis. However, the current expansion towards the
nanoscale is also acting as a diverging, rather than as a
converging, force. Initiatives have sprung up in various
countries, including Japan7, the USA, Europe and
China. If indeed materialswas a buzzword of the 1980s,
then it has been superseded today by nano. According
to David Pettifor, a member of the Department of
Materials at Oxford University,If it [materials science]
is a science that enables engineers to make things, it is
not about to gain coherence as it spreads and dilutes
itself into more and more fields such as biomaterials and
nanotechnology. Maybe it will disappear from most
universities as a unique undergraduate discipline in the
future, as the core disciplines of physics, chemistry,
biology and engineering set up interdisciplinary courses
and modules.8 If nanoscience stabilizes into a coherent
field, then it may turn out that materials science will
have no future as a discrete discipline. In the same way
that radioactivity a booming field and a teachable
discipline in the early twentieth century has been
absorbed into nuclear physics, materials science could
be seen in the future as the prehistory of a complex
system of converging technologies, such as NBIC
(nanoscience, biotechnology, information technology
and cognitive science)9.
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COMMENTARY
So the identity of materials science remains elusive
and its future uncertain.Is it just a field artificially
created by science policy? What noun should be added
after the term materials? Is it a science, a research field
or a discipline? MSE hardly looks like a traditional
discipline in view of its claim for interdisciplinarity,
which has been a major feature since its very beginning.
MSE is a discipline only in the sense that it is a subject
taught in academic institutions, with curricula,
textbooks and diplomas. However, the essentials of this
discipline are a cluster of subjects taken from physics or
chemistry. MSE is often taught as an applied science,
bridging the gap between elementary courses in
fundamental science and engineering training.
If materials can hardly be considered as a discipline,
can it be a (multifaceted) science? To be sure, physics
and chemistry are also multifaceted, but their diversity
results from a process of diversification within a field,
which keeps some cohesion. By contrast, the diversity
offered by MSE was constitutive from its very
beginning, and there is no limit to it, as the territory of
MSE has virtually no definite borders.Consequently,the
practitioners of MSE do not make a community:
although the professional activity of highly specialized
physicists may be totally different, they share a common
culture acquired at an earlier stage, and can still present
themselves as physicists. Few individuals active in the
field of materials research would define themselves as a
materials scientist. They are physicists, or chemists, or
metallurgists, or mechanical engineers, or chemical
engineers. They are defined by their respective
backgrounds, rather than by their current field of
research. They do not belong to the MRS as they do to a
Physical or a Chemical society.As Mike Driver of the
MRS remarked (personal communication):
membership of the Physics Society resembles covalent
bonding, whereas membership of the MRS resembles
van der Waals bonding.
Within the whole spectrum of scientific enterprise,
materials research is the prototype of a new style of
scientific practice that does not lead to stable disciplines.
It is characterized by a closer integration of industrial
and academic research, by science-based innovations
with techniques and instrumentation acting as driving
forces, and by the blurring of boundaries between
disciplines (between pure and applied, and between
academia and the public sphere). Materials research
thus pioneers a future in which natural science will be
more open to social demands.
References
1. Cahn, R. W. The Coming of Materials Science (Pergamon, Amsterdam, 2001).
2. Cahn, R. W. Nature Mater. 1, 34 (2002).
3. http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/materials/public/Livage_interview.htm
4. http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/materials/public/FriedelJacques/
FriedelJacques_intro.htm
5. National Research Council. Materials Science and Engineering for the 1990s
(Report of the Committee on Materials Science and Engineering, National
Academy Press, Washington DC, 1989).
6. Boyd, I. W., Glasow, P., Grimmeiss, P., Habermeier, H.-U. & Siffert, P. Nature
Mater. 2, 563565 (2004).
7. Kishi, T. & Bandio, Y. Nature Mater. 3, 129131 (2004).
8. http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/materials/public/Pettifor/DavidPettifor.htm
9. Roco, M. C. & Bainbridge, W. S. (eds) Converging Technologies for Improving
Human Performance (Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, 2003).
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