MRS 20th Anniversar

1973-1993

As the

Presidents See

It...

The

Ideals

and

Ideas that Led to

MRS

RustumRoy,

1977MRS President

My year as official President, 1977,

started in

1976

and differed little from the

decade 1967-77, which was, in materials

science terminology, the nucleation phase

of the Materials Research Society. Who

we are today is stamped with the struc-

ture of the nucleus that eventually sur-

vived and reached critical radius. I will

write about our ideological roots, if not

our space group and symmetry.

Max de Pree, CEO of Herman Miller,

which is consistently rated as one of the

best-run corporations in America, has

written in his widely respected book,

Leadership

is an Art, that every successful

organization and its people must be thor-

oughly imbued with that organization's

own vision and "story." What was the

common vision of the Materials Research

Society founders? Where did they acquire

that vision? How did they bring it to

fruition? Bringing the story of

MRS

to its

members is the focus of this short essay.

Although, as the reader can see in my

article on page 74, the beginnings of the

Society are linked, for 16 years, to the

Materials Research Laboratory at Penn

State, the existence of the Materials

Research Society (MRS) is one more proof

of Margaret Mead's wonderful admoni-

tion:

"Never doubt that a small group of

thoughtful, committed citizens can change

the

world;

indeed it's the only thing that

ever

has."

This article is about such a group and

their vision.

People

MRS was brought into being by a small

group of "conspirators" who were com-

mitted to changing the world of profes-

sional meetings and society affiliations.

They were committed to genuinely

engendering, fostering, and sustaining

interdisciplinary interaction. They knew

that something new had to be done

because, by the late 1960s, in spite of

rhetorical lip service and massive "incen-

tives"

by the federal government, most of

the university world had hardly budged

from its disciplinary moorings. Many of

the names of these early founders of the

Society will appear in this article and,

with due apologies to some of them, I

believe that Harry Gatos, Ken Jackson,

Mark Myers, I. Warshaw, and I were the

key players in creating MRS. I served as

host and facilitator of the group. Two

institutions provided most of the (not

inconsiderable) bootlegged support for

several years: Penn State's Materials

Research Laboratory (which I directed)

and the Bell Telephone Labs, via Jackson,

backed by Bruce Hannay, vice president,

and, of course, Bill Baker, president.

MRS

was brought into

being by a small group

of "conspirators" who

were committed to

changing the world of

professional meetings

and society affiliations.

Vision

In the early phases (1967-83), during

most of which the Society and its precur-

sor activities were administered out of

our lab at Penn State, the vision which

guided those involved with the Society

had certain key elements. First, the

Society was to focus

exclusively

interac-

tive

factors in three dimensions of materi-

als research:

• Interdisciplinary research, with materi-

als science and engineering clearly identi-

fied as one discipline (department),

alongside electrical engineering, physics,

chemistry, etc.

• Interaction along the science-to-engi-

neering-to-technology axis.

• Interaction among institutions of engi-

neering and science: industry, university,

and government laboratories.

Since there were half a dozen materials

societies in place, our vision and opportu-

nity, we knew, lay in the interstices and

overlap. That is what

MRS

had to empha-

size to find its place in the lineup.

A second element of the MRS vision

was to be constantly attentive to innova-

tion in the Society's business, which was

enhancing communication among the

Society's members, and from them to the

larger society beyond. Three or four key

innovations, present from the beginning

MRS

history, were:

• The use of simultaneous "topical" sym-

posia (like Gordon Conferences) as the

focal points for the entire program. This

model also provided a unique mecha-

nism for involving a whole series of new-

to-MRS scientists in each symposium. (To

this "invention," now copied almost uni-

versally by most disciplinary societies,

MRS owes much of its numerical suc-

cess.)

• Maintaining a genuine balance of top-

ics within the ellipsoid of interaction to

involve the widest spectrum of interests,

disciplines, and potential members. (A

healthy pattern was established by the

bringing in of two materials groups—the

cement and the "rad waste" groups. Penn

State's MRL had the major university

research efforts in both these fields, mak-

ing it possible, therefore, to offset the

high-tech laser-processing and electronic

materials bias which would have set in.)

• Providing sufficient opportunity for

specialists to apprehend the overall pic-

ture of materials research. Symposium X

has always been very successful in doing

this for senior experienced managers, but

the fraction of attendees taking advantage

of it has become smaller, instead of larger.

• Continuing always to experiment in

the heartland of the Society's business—

innovation in communicating informa-

tion about science among scientists—

beyond meetings, journals, and proceed-

ings volumes. This was the motivation

behind our experiments with live satellite

broadcasting of selected symposium ses-

sions,

our videotaping of sessions, and

the video history of our field.

Present and Future

What would that small group of con-

spirators who founded the Society say of

it today?

They would be duly proud of the place

MRS has taken among all the materials

societies. They would be especially proud

of the success of their model for using

topical symposia as the substance of the

meetings. Also, they would be proud of

the involvement of large numbers of new

people, and of the ability the Society has

shown for broadening its base to encom-

pass many different fields of materials.

They would know that we grew on the

back of the rising tide of

U.S.

technology

and science of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s

and they would look ahead to prepare for

the ebbtide.

Yet there would be, I suspect, some

regrets. Small remains beautiful. The

unwillingness to tame the growth and

grandiosity virus that affects American

institutions has, perhaps, led MRS to

doing more of the same, instead of con-

MRS BULLETIN/SEPTMBER

1993

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MRS 20th Anniversary

1973-1993

tinually experimenting with the new. We

are intellectually and emotionally ill-pre-

pared for real downsizing. The necessary

centripetal forces and sessions which are

essential to our self-understanding as a

community have simply been drowned

out by a proliferation of symposia and

papers.

The Society has not been able to

involve the polymer community to a

major extent. (Less than 5% of the

Journal

of Materials Research is devoted to poly-

mers.) Nor has MRS yet been able to

We grew on the back

the rising tide of

U.S.

technology and science

of the 1960s, 1970s,

and 1980s.

bring in pre-existing, specialized societies

such as Carbon, EMSA, etc. The focus on

all three dimensions of interdisciplinarity

has been fuzzed up, not sharpened.

Remarkably, MRS is the least active

among many societies in engaging its

members in societal matters.

So be it. Let these be the challenges

which the Society will tackle for the next

20 years.

Rustunt Roy is Evan Pugh Professor of

the Solid State at Pennsylvania State Uni-

versity.

How It All Evolved

Harry C.

Gatos,

1973-1976 MRS

President

The founding and operation of MRS

was the culmination of my ten years of

frustrated effort in searching for a profes-

sional home (old, renovated, or new) for

the young, homeless materials science.

The leaders of the existing materials soci-

eties strenuously resisted accepting that

materials science existed outside the

materials they dealt with, be they metals,

ceramics, or polymers. The founders of

MRS were just a small but "driven"

minority with a vision of a "materials-

blind" materials society. With due respect

for all the founders, I must say that

among all of us, Rustum Roy had the

greatest vision. He was the most vocal,

the most energetic, the most convincing,

and the greatest doer.

The early years of MRS have been

highlighted in the MRS

Bulletin

by other

former presidents. I need not elaborate

further. I would like, instead, to trace the

roots and shaping of our discipline. I will

also comment on my experiences with

professional societies prior to the found-

ing of

MRS.

It all began with the discovery of the

transistor in the late 1940s, which led to

the transformation from the vacuum tube

to solid-state electronics. This transforma-

tion cannot, however, be referred to as a

development, an improvement, or a

change. Going from the vacuum tube (or

radio tube) to the silicon chip, which can

contain many millions of vacuum-tube-

equivalent devices, cannot be called an

improvement. A hand-held computer

cannot be referred to as an improvement

of ENIAC (the first advanced computer

built in the 1940s) which had 18,000 vacu-

um tubes and, when it was turned on,

allegedly dimmed the lights of the city of

Philadelphia.

The transformation to solid-state elec-

tronics resulted in the birth of a new and

different era for science and technology.

That birth took place in 1948, the first

infant steps were taken in the early 1950s,

and from then on there has been runaway

growth.

Let us look at the heart of this transfor-

mation. Vacuum tube electronics is based

on the generation and control of electrons

in vacuum. In semiconductor electronics,

the current carriers (electrons and holes)

originate in the atoms within the solid,

and their characteristics depend on the

atomic-scale structure and composition of

the solid.

It is instructive to go back to about

1950.

The understanding of the conduc-

tion of carriers in semiconductors and

their manipulation to achieve device

functions were at a respectably high level,

even by today's standards. In fact, the

book by William Shockley,

Electrons

and

Holes in Semiconductors, a classic in that

field, was published in 1950.

What about the state, at that time, of

suitable materials for fabricating working

semiconductor devices? For all practical

purposes, such materials did not exist.

Germanium single crystals with repro-

ducible characteristics were necessary (Ge

was then the key semiconductor).

Technology for single-crystal growth

from the melt was hardly in existence.

Starting materials with background

impurities less than a few parts per bil-

Views on MRS and materials

research from former MRS

presidents.

lion were needed; that meant many

orders of magnitude beyond the prevail-

ing limits. No crystalline defects—planar,

line,

or point—should be present. At that

time,

these requirements were just fan-

tasies;

so was the realization of devices

which were being conceived, and even

patented. Some of these theoretically con-

ceived devices were fabricated many

years later (as suitable materials and

processes were developed) and were

proven to be valid and valuable.

I quote from the book The New

Alchemist by Dirk Hanson, a journalist,

reporting on this period of the early

1950s. He states: "At first the financial

arguments of sticking with the vacuum

tube were persuasive, and tube engineers

could readily temper the enthusiasm of

the solid-state people with the weight of

experience. Maybe the transistor was not

going to be such a big thing after all. The

early fuss died down. For one thing, the

manufacturing methods were completely

ad hoc and seat-of-the-pants. Controlling

electricity by rearranging the atoms was

nice practice, in theory, but not quite so

awe-inspiring when it came to the pro-

duction line, where almost anything

could go wrong, and frequently did. It

was like trying to do surgery on the head

of a pin. It was wondrous that transistors

worked at all, and quite often, they did

not. Those that did varied widely in per-

formance, and it was sometimes easier to

test them after production and, on that

basis,

find out what kind of electronic

component they had turned out to be. If

they failed, it could have been due to any

number of undesirable impurities that

had sneaked into the doping process. It

was as if the Ford Motor Company was

running a production line so uncontrol-

lable that it had to test the finished prod-

uct to find out if it was a truck, a convert-

ible or a sedan."

Actually, the situation was worse than

MRS BULLETIN/SEPTEMBER

1993

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