essay on advancement in science and technology

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Essay on Science and Technology for Students: 100, 200, 350 Words

• Updated on  
• Sep 20, 2023

Writing an essay on science and technology requires you to keep yourself updated with the recent developments in this field. Science is a field which has no limits. It is the most potent of all the fields and when combined with technology, then even the sky doesn’t remain a limit. Science is everywhere from the minute microscopic organisms to the gigantic celestial bodies. It’s the very essence of our existence. Let’s learn about Science and Technology in an essay format.

Also Read – Essay on Corruption

Essay on Science and Technology in 100 Words

Everything we do, every breath we take, every move we make, every interaction with any object, and even the thoughts we have, and the dreams we see, all involve science. Similarly, as the world is progressing, technology is getting intertwined with even the basic aspects of our lives. Be it education, sports, entertainment, talking to our loved ones, etc. Everything is inclusive of Technology nowadays. It is safe to say that Science and Technology go hand-in-hand. They are mutually inclusive of each other. Although from a broader perspective, Technology is a branch of Science, but still, each of these fields cannot be sustained without the other.

Essay on Science and Technology in 200 Words

Science and Technology are important aspects of life from the very beginning of the day to the end of it. We wake up in the morning because of the sound of our alarm clocks and go to bed at night after switching off our lights. Most importantly, it helps us save time is one of the results of advancements in science and technology. Each day new Technologies are being developed that are making human life easier and much more convenient.Advantages of Science and Technology

If we were to name the advantages of science and technology, then we would fall short of words because they are numerous. These range from the very little things to the very big ones.

Science and Technology are the fields that have enabled man to look beyond our own planet and hence, discover new planets and much more. And the most recent of the Project of India, The successful landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the south pole of the moon proves that the potential of Science and Technology cannot be fathomed via any means. The potential it holds is immense. 

In conclusion, we can confidently say that Science and Technology have led us to achieve an absolutely amazing life. However, it is extremely important to make use of the same in a judicious way so as to ensure its sustenance. 

Also Read – Essay on Noise Pollution

Essay on Science and Technology in 350 Words

Science and Technology include everything, from the smallest of the microbes to the most complex of the mechanisms. Our world cannot exist without Science and Technology. It is hard to imagine our lives without science and technology now. 

Impact of Science & Technology 

The impact of science and technology is so massive that it incorporates almost each and every field of science and even others. The cures to various diseases are being made due to the advancement in Science and Technology only. Also, technology has enhanced the production of crops and other agricultural practices also rely on Science and Technology for their own advancement. All of the luxuries that we have on a day-to-day basis in our lives are because of Science and Technology. Subsequently, the fields of Science and Technology have also assisted in the development of other fields as well such as, Mathematics , Astrophysics , Nuclear Energy , etc. Hence, we can say that we live in the era of Science and Technology. 

Safety Measures

Although the field of Science and Technology has provided the world with innumerable advancements and benefits that are carrying the world forward, there are a lot of aspects of the same that have a negative impact too. The negative impact of these is primarily on nature and wildlife and hence, indirectly and directly on humans as well.

The large factories that are associated with manufacturing or other developmental processes release large amounts of waste which may or may not be toxic in nature. This waste gets deposited in nature and water bodies and causes pollution. The animals marine or terrestrial living in their respective ecosystems may even ingest plastic or other toxic waste and that leads to their death. There are a lot of other negative aspects of the same.

Hence, it becomes our responsibility to use Science and Technology judiciously and prevent the degradation of nature and wildlife so as to sustain our planet, along with all its ecosystems, which will eventually ensure our existence in a healthy ecosystem leading to healthy and long life.

Science is something that is limitless. It is the most potent of all the fields and when combined with technology, then even the sky doesn’t remain a limit. Science is everywhere from the minute microscopic organisms to the most gigantic ones. It’s the very essence of our existence.

Science and Technology are important aspects of life. All of the luxuries that we have on a day-to-day basis in our lives are because of Science and Technology. Most importantly, it helps us save time is one of the results of advancements in science and technology. It is hard to imagine our lives without science and technology now. 

In any nation, science and technology holds a crucial part in its development in all aspect. The progress of the nation is dependent upon science and technology. It holds the to economic growth, changing the quality of life, and transformation of the society.

We hope this blog of ours on Essay on Science and Technology has helped you gain a deeper knowledge of the same. For more such informative and educational essays please visit our site:- Leverage Edu Essay Writing .

Deepansh Gautam

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Essay on Science and Technology for Students and Children

500+ words essay on science and technology.

Essay on Science and Technology: Science and technology are important parts of our day to day life. We get up in the morning from the ringing of our alarm clocks and go to bed at night after switching our lights off. All these luxuries that we are able to afford are a resultant of science and technology . Most importantly, how we can do all this in a short time are because of the advancement of science and technology only. It is hard to imagine our life now without science and technology. Indeed our existence itself depends on it now. Every day new technologies are coming up which are making human life easier and more comfortable. Thus, we live in an era of science and technology.

Essentially, Science and Technology have introduced us to the establishment of modern civilization . This development contributes greatly to almost every aspect of our daily life. Hence, people get the chance to enjoy these results, which make our lives more relaxed and pleasurable.

Benefits of Science and Technology

If we think about it, there are numerous benefits of science and technology. They range from the little things to the big ones. For instance, the morning paper which we read that delivers us reliable information is a result of scientific progress. In addition, the electrical devices without which life is hard to imagine like a refrigerator, AC, microwave and more are a result of technological advancement.

Furthermore, if we look at the transport scenario, we notice how science and technology play a major role here as well. We can quickly reach the other part of the earth within hours, all thanks to advancing technology.

In addition, science and technology have enabled man to look further than our planet. The discovery of new planets and the establishment of satellites in space is because of the very same science and technology. Similarly, science and technology have also made an impact on the medical and agricultural fields. The various cures being discovered for diseases have saved millions of lives through science. Moreover, technology has enhanced the production of different crops benefitting the farmers largely.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

India and Science and Technology

Ever since British rule, India has been in talks all over the world. After gaining independence, it is science and technology which helped India advance through times. Now, it has become an essential source of creative and foundational scientific developments all over the world. In other words, all the incredible scientific and technological advancements of our country have enhanced the Indian economy.

Looking at the most recent achievement, India successfully launched Chandrayaan 2. This lunar exploration of India has earned critical acclaim from all over the world. Once again, this achievement was made possible due to science and technology.

In conclusion, we must admit that science and technology have led human civilization to achieve perfection in living. However, we must utilize everything in wise perspectives and to limited extents. Misuse of science and technology can produce harmful consequences. Therefore, we must monitor the use and be wise in our actions.

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Promises and Pitfalls of Technology

Politics and privacy, private-sector influence and big tech, state competition and conflict, author biography, how is technology changing the world, and how should the world change technology.

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Josephine Wolff; How Is Technology Changing the World, and How Should the World Change Technology?. Global Perspectives 1 February 2021; 2 (1): 27353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.27353

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Technologies are becoming increasingly complicated and increasingly interconnected. Cars, airplanes, medical devices, financial transactions, and electricity systems all rely on more computer software than they ever have before, making them seem both harder to understand and, in some cases, harder to control. Government and corporate surveillance of individuals and information processing relies largely on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, and therefore involves less human-to-human contact than ever before and more opportunities for biases to be embedded and codified in our technological systems in ways we may not even be able to identify or recognize. Bioengineering advances are opening up new terrain for challenging philosophical, political, and economic questions regarding human-natural relations. Additionally, the management of these large and small devices and systems is increasingly done through the cloud, so that control over them is both very remote and removed from direct human or social control. The study of how to make technologies like artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things “explainable” has become its own area of research because it is so difficult to understand how they work or what is at fault when something goes wrong (Gunning and Aha 2019) .

This growing complexity makes it more difficult than ever—and more imperative than ever—for scholars to probe how technological advancements are altering life around the world in both positive and negative ways and what social, political, and legal tools are needed to help shape the development and design of technology in beneficial directions. This can seem like an impossible task in light of the rapid pace of technological change and the sense that its continued advancement is inevitable, but many countries around the world are only just beginning to take significant steps toward regulating computer technologies and are still in the process of radically rethinking the rules governing global data flows and exchange of technology across borders.

These are exciting times not just for technological development but also for technology policy—our technologies may be more advanced and complicated than ever but so, too, are our understandings of how they can best be leveraged, protected, and even constrained. The structures of technological systems as determined largely by government and institutional policies and those structures have tremendous implications for social organization and agency, ranging from open source, open systems that are highly distributed and decentralized, to those that are tightly controlled and closed, structured according to stricter and more hierarchical models. And just as our understanding of the governance of technology is developing in new and interesting ways, so, too, is our understanding of the social, cultural, environmental, and political dimensions of emerging technologies. We are realizing both the challenges and the importance of mapping out the full range of ways that technology is changing our society, what we want those changes to look like, and what tools we have to try to influence and guide those shifts.

Technology can be a source of tremendous optimism. It can help overcome some of the greatest challenges our society faces, including climate change, famine, and disease. For those who believe in the power of innovation and the promise of creative destruction to advance economic development and lead to better quality of life, technology is a vital economic driver (Schumpeter 1942) . But it can also be a tool of tremendous fear and oppression, embedding biases in automated decision-making processes and information-processing algorithms, exacerbating economic and social inequalities within and between countries to a staggering degree, or creating new weapons and avenues for attack unlike any we have had to face in the past. Scholars have even contended that the emergence of the term technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked a shift from viewing individual pieces of machinery as a means to achieving political and social progress to the more dangerous, or hazardous, view that larger-scale, more complex technological systems were a semiautonomous form of progress in and of themselves (Marx 2010) . More recently, technologists have sharply criticized what they view as a wave of new Luddites, people intent on slowing the development of technology and turning back the clock on innovation as a means of mitigating the societal impacts of technological change (Marlowe 1970) .

At the heart of fights over new technologies and their resulting global changes are often two conflicting visions of technology: a fundamentally optimistic one that believes humans use it as a tool to achieve greater goals, and a fundamentally pessimistic one that holds that technological systems have reached a point beyond our control. Technology philosophers have argued that neither of these views is wholly accurate and that a purely optimistic or pessimistic view of technology is insufficient to capture the nuances and complexity of our relationship to technology (Oberdiek and Tiles 1995) . Understanding technology and how we can make better decisions about designing, deploying, and refining it requires capturing that nuance and complexity through in-depth analysis of the impacts of different technological advancements and the ways they have played out in all their complicated and controversial messiness across the world.

These impacts are often unpredictable as technologies are adopted in new contexts and come to be used in ways that sometimes diverge significantly from the use cases envisioned by their designers. The internet, designed to help transmit information between computer networks, became a crucial vehicle for commerce, introducing unexpected avenues for crime and financial fraud. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, designed to connect friends and families through sharing photographs and life updates, became focal points of election controversies and political influence. Cryptocurrencies, originally intended as a means of decentralized digital cash, have become a significant environmental hazard as more and more computing resources are devoted to mining these forms of virtual money. One of the crucial challenges in this area is therefore recognizing, documenting, and even anticipating some of these unexpected consequences and providing mechanisms to technologists for how to think through the impacts of their work, as well as possible other paths to different outcomes (Verbeek 2006) . And just as technological innovations can cause unexpected harm, they can also bring about extraordinary benefits—new vaccines and medicines to address global pandemics and save thousands of lives, new sources of energy that can drastically reduce emissions and help combat climate change, new modes of education that can reach people who would otherwise have no access to schooling. Regulating technology therefore requires a careful balance of mitigating risks without overly restricting potentially beneficial innovations.

Nations around the world have taken very different approaches to governing emerging technologies and have adopted a range of different technologies themselves in pursuit of more modern governance structures and processes (Braman 2009) . In Europe, the precautionary principle has guided much more anticipatory regulation aimed at addressing the risks presented by technologies even before they are fully realized. For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation focuses on the responsibilities of data controllers and processors to provide individuals with access to their data and information about how that data is being used not just as a means of addressing existing security and privacy threats, such as data breaches, but also to protect against future developments and uses of that data for artificial intelligence and automated decision-making purposes. In Germany, Technische Überwachungsvereine, or TÜVs, perform regular tests and inspections of technological systems to assess and minimize risks over time, as the tech landscape evolves. In the United States, by contrast, there is much greater reliance on litigation and liability regimes to address safety and security failings after-the-fact. These different approaches reflect not just the different legal and regulatory mechanisms and philosophies of different nations but also the different ways those nations prioritize rapid development of the technology industry versus safety, security, and individual control. Typically, governance innovations move much more slowly than technological innovations, and regulations can lag years, or even decades, behind the technologies they aim to govern.

In addition to this varied set of national regulatory approaches, a variety of international and nongovernmental organizations also contribute to the process of developing standards, rules, and norms for new technologies, including the International Organization for Standardization­ and the International Telecommunication Union. These multilateral and NGO actors play an especially important role in trying to define appropriate boundaries for the use of new technologies by governments as instruments of control for the state.

At the same time that policymakers are under scrutiny both for their decisions about how to regulate technology as well as their decisions about how and when to adopt technologies like facial recognition themselves, technology firms and designers have also come under increasing criticism. Growing recognition that the design of technologies can have far-reaching social and political implications means that there is more pressure on technologists to take into consideration the consequences of their decisions early on in the design process (Vincenti 1993; Winner 1980) . The question of how technologists should incorporate these social dimensions into their design and development processes is an old one, and debate on these issues dates back to the 1970s, but it remains an urgent and often overlooked part of the puzzle because so many of the supposedly systematic mechanisms for assessing the impacts of new technologies in both the private and public sectors are primarily bureaucratic, symbolic processes rather than carrying any real weight or influence.

Technologists are often ill-equipped or unwilling to respond to the sorts of social problems that their creations have—often unwittingly—exacerbated, and instead point to governments and lawmakers to address those problems (Zuckerberg 2019) . But governments often have few incentives to engage in this area. This is because setting clear standards and rules for an ever-evolving technological landscape can be extremely challenging, because enforcement of those rules can be a significant undertaking requiring considerable expertise, and because the tech sector is a major source of jobs and revenue for many countries that may fear losing those benefits if they constrain companies too much. This indicates not just a need for clearer incentives and better policies for both private- and public-sector entities but also a need for new mechanisms whereby the technology development and design process can be influenced and assessed by people with a wider range of experiences and expertise. If we want technologies to be designed with an eye to their impacts, who is responsible for predicting, measuring, and mitigating those impacts throughout the design process? Involving policymakers in that process in a more meaningful way will also require training them to have the analytic and technical capacity to more fully engage with technologists and understand more fully the implications of their decisions.

At the same time that tech companies seem unwilling or unable to rein in their creations, many also fear they wield too much power, in some cases all but replacing governments and international organizations in their ability to make decisions that affect millions of people worldwide and control access to information, platforms, and audiences (Kilovaty 2020) . Regulators around the world have begun considering whether some of these companies have become so powerful that they violate the tenets of antitrust laws, but it can be difficult for governments to identify exactly what those violations are, especially in the context of an industry where the largest players often provide their customers with free services. And the platforms and services developed by tech companies are often wielded most powerfully and dangerously not directly by their private-sector creators and operators but instead by states themselves for widespread misinformation campaigns that serve political purposes (Nye 2018) .

Since the largest private entities in the tech sector operate in many countries, they are often better poised to implement global changes to the technological ecosystem than individual states or regulatory bodies, creating new challenges to existing governance structures and hierarchies. Just as it can be challenging to provide oversight for government use of technologies, so, too, oversight of the biggest tech companies, which have more resources, reach, and power than many nations, can prove to be a daunting task. The rise of network forms of organization and the growing gig economy have added to these challenges, making it even harder for regulators to fully address the breadth of these companies’ operations (Powell 1990) . The private-public partnerships that have emerged around energy, transportation, medical, and cyber technologies further complicate this picture, blurring the line between the public and private sectors and raising critical questions about the role of each in providing critical infrastructure, health care, and security. How can and should private tech companies operating in these different sectors be governed, and what types of influence do they exert over regulators? How feasible are different policy proposals aimed at technological innovation, and what potential unintended consequences might they have?

Conflict between countries has also spilled over significantly into the private sector in recent years, most notably in the case of tensions between the United States and China over which technologies developed in each country will be permitted by the other and which will be purchased by other customers, outside those two countries. Countries competing to develop the best technology is not a new phenomenon, but the current conflicts have major international ramifications and will influence the infrastructure that is installed and used around the world for years to come. Untangling the different factors that feed into these tussles as well as whom they benefit and whom they leave at a disadvantage is crucial for understanding how governments can most effectively foster technological innovation and invention domestically as well as the global consequences of those efforts. As much of the world is forced to choose between buying technology from the United States or from China, how should we understand the long-term impacts of those choices and the options available to people in countries without robust domestic tech industries? Does the global spread of technologies help fuel further innovation in countries with smaller tech markets, or does it reinforce the dominance of the states that are already most prominent in this sector? How can research universities maintain global collaborations and research communities in light of these national competitions, and what role does government research and development spending play in fostering innovation within its own borders and worldwide? How should intellectual property protections evolve to meet the demands of the technology industry, and how can those protections be enforced globally?

These conflicts between countries sometimes appear to challenge the feasibility of truly global technologies and networks that operate across all countries through standardized protocols and design features. Organizations like the International Organization for Standardization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and many others have tried to harmonize these policies and protocols across different countries for years, but have met with limited success when it comes to resolving the issues of greatest tension and disagreement among nations. For technology to operate in a global environment, there is a need for a much greater degree of coordination among countries and the development of common standards and norms, but governments continue to struggle to agree not just on those norms themselves but even the appropriate venue and processes for developing them. Without greater global cooperation, is it possible to maintain a global network like the internet or to promote the spread of new technologies around the world to address challenges of sustainability? What might help incentivize that cooperation moving forward, and what could new structures and process for governance of global technologies look like? Why has the tech industry’s self-regulation culture persisted? Do the same traditional drivers for public policy, such as politics of harmonization and path dependency in policy-making, still sufficiently explain policy outcomes in this space? As new technologies and their applications spread across the globe in uneven ways, how and when do they create forces of change from unexpected places?

These are some of the questions that we hope to address in the Technology and Global Change section through articles that tackle new dimensions of the global landscape of designing, developing, deploying, and assessing new technologies to address major challenges the world faces. Understanding these processes requires synthesizing knowledge from a range of different fields, including sociology, political science, economics, and history, as well as technical fields such as engineering, climate science, and computer science. A crucial part of understanding how technology has created global change and, in turn, how global changes have influenced the development of new technologies is understanding the technologies themselves in all their richness and complexity—how they work, the limits of what they can do, what they were designed to do, how they are actually used. Just as technologies themselves are becoming more complicated, so are their embeddings and relationships to the larger social, political, and legal contexts in which they exist. Scholars across all disciplines are encouraged to join us in untangling those complexities.

Josephine Wolff is an associate professor of cybersecurity policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her book You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches was published by MIT Press in 2018.

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• Science and Technology Essay

Essay on Science and Technology

Science and technology is the ultimate need of an hour that changes the overall perspective of the human towards life. Over the centuries, there have been new inventions in the field of science and technology that help in modernizing. Right from connecting with people to using digital products, everything involves science and technology. In other words, it has made life easy and simple. Moreover, humans now have to live a simple life. There is modern equipment explored by tech experts to find something new for the future.

Science and technology have now expanded their wings to medical, education, manufacturing and other areas. Moreover, they are not limited to cities, but also rural areas for educational purposes. Every day new technologies keep coming, making life easier and more comfortable.

Brief about Science

Throughout history, science has come a long way. The evolution of the person is the contribution to science. Science helped humans to find vaccines, potions, medicines and scientific aids. Over the centuries, humans have faced many diseases and illnesses taking many lives. With the help of science, medicines are invented to bring down the effect or element of these illnesses.

Brief of Technology

The mobile, desktop or laptop which you are using for reading this essay, mobile you use for connectivity or communication or the smart technology which we use in our daily life, are a part of technology. From the machinery used in the factory to the robots created all fall under tech invention. In simpler words, technology has made life more comfortable.

Advancement in science and technology has changed the modern culture and the way we live our daily life.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Science and Technology

Science and technology have changed this world. From TV to planes, cars to mobile, the list keeps on going how these two inventions have changed the world we see through. For instance, the virtual talks we do use our mobile, which was not possible earlier. Similarly, there are electrical devices that have made life easier.

Furthermore, the transportation process we use has also seen the contribution of science and technology. We can reach our destination quickly to any part of the world.

Science and technology are not limited to this earth. It has now reached mars. NASA and ISRO have used science and technology to reach mars. Both organizations have witnessed success in sending astronauts and technologies to explore life in the mars.

Other Benefits

Life is much simpler with science and technology

Interaction is more comfortable and faster

Human is more sophisticated

Disadvantages

With the progress in science and technology, we humans have become lazier. This is affecting the human mind and health. Moreover, several semi-automatic rifles are created using the latest technology, which takes maximum life. There is no doubt that the third world war will be fought with missiles created using technology.

Man has misused the tech and used it for destructive purposes.

 Man uses them to do illegal stuff.

Technology such as a smartphone, etc. hurts children.

Terrorists use modern technology for damaging work.

Science and Technology in India

India is not behind when it comes to science and technology. Over the centuries, the country has witnessed reliable technology updates giving its people a better life. The Indian economy is widely boosted with science and technology in the field of astronomy, astrophysics, space exploration, nuclear power and more. India is becoming more innovative and progressive to improve the economic condition of the nation.

The implementation of technology in the research work promotes a better life ahead. Similarly, medical science in India is progressing rapidly, making life healthy and careful. Indian scientists are using the latest technology to introduce new medical products for people and offer them at the lowest price.

The Bottom Line

The main aim of writing this essay on science and technology is to showcase how humans have evolved over the years. Since we are advancing, the science and technology industry is also advancing at a faster pace. Although there are challenges, the road ahead is exciting. From interaction to transportation and healthcare in every sector, we will witness profitable growth in science and technology.

FAQs on Science and Technology Essay

1. How technology changed humans?

Technology has certainly changed the way we live our lives. Not a single piece of technology has failed and is continuously progressing. Be it the small industry or large, technology is a boom to your society. Technology can encompass ancient technologies like calculators, calendars, batteries and others. In future, the technology worlds include Blockchain technologies, smart cities, more advanced intelligent devices, quantum computers, quantum encryption, and others. Humans are updated with technology. This is a good sign for the coming generation.

2. What are the top technologies?

In the last few years, there has been a massive update in technology. From individuals to companies, everywhere, the use of technology is required. Some of the top technologies we are witnessing are

 Data Science

 Internet of Things

 Blockchain

 Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

 Virtual Reality

 Edge Computing

Intelligent apps

Artificial Intelligence

Each of these technologies is in the use of daily life and even in making products. However, to use this technology, there is a requirement of skilled professionals and they need proper training to use them.

3. Is the topic Science and Technology an appropriate topic for students?

Yes, Science and Technology are one of the most important topics every student should know in their schooling. The world is growing rapidly at an increasing rate where one should be equipped with minimum knowledge about these concepts. Science and technology have become a part of everyone’s life today. Therefore understanding them is definitely important.

4. Does writing essays improve English?

Yes, of course it does. Writing is absolutely fundamental to language learning. As with anything, however, it is important to learn when and what you write. If you do it all the time, your writing might sound forced. If you only do it when you don't have anything better to do, you might find yourself procrastinating, and not do it at all. It's also a lot more effective to compose essays when you are in that mindset of an essay. So, to answer your question, yes.

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Developments in Science and Technology and their Applications and Effects in Everyday Life

Last updated on March 3, 2024 by ClearIAS Team

Science and technology have given rise to several machinery and tools in different fields.

The use of these tools and machinery has helped in reducing the time, effort, and energy required in doing different works.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Science and technology (S&T) is universally acknowledged as a crucial tool for supporting and enhancing the nation’s economic and social growth. Over the years, India has made major advancements in many fields of science and technology, and now we can be proud of its robust network of S&T institutions, skilled workforce, and cutting-edge knowledge base.

The significance of bolstering the knowledge base has grown due to the rapid pace of globalization, the quick depletion of material resources, the rising competitiveness among states, and the increasing necessity to protect intellectual property.

• Strengthening application-oriented research and development (R&D) for technology generation, fostering the development of human resources, particularly by enticing bright students to pursue careers in science, encouraging research into and application of science and technology (S&T) for predicting, preventing, and mitigating natural disasters, integrating S&T developments with all facets of national activities, and utilizing S&T to improve quality of life are all priorities today.
• S&T is crucial to both macroeconomic growth and the microeconomic development of business competitiveness. For science and technology, globalization and liberalization have created both great potential and significant difficulties.

Developments in Science and Technology

Indians, like people in every other region of the world, have a rich tradition of scientific thinking. Science has traditionally been characterized by a curiosity for the unknown, together with experimentation and observation. The implication that truth could only be found in the real world with all of its richness and complexity resulted from this.

In the context of research and development, communities of people, institutions, and organizations exchange visions for the future of technology. They extrapolate the concepts into the not-too-distant future based on the consensus regarding their desirability and viability.

These goals, therefore, take on a flexible, dynamic nature and have a significant impact on how innovation processes develop. They influence the intricate multi-actor process of choosing whether to pursue particular technical choices while excluding others from research and development initiatives.

Popular visions like the “information superhighway,” the “cashless society,” or the “paperless office” gain strength by combining institutions with the experience and knowledge of the people involved, fusing what is possible with what is desired in a unique and quite effective way.

Science and Technology in Ancient and Medieval India

India has a strong scientific and technological heritage. In India, scientific advancement is an outdated practice. India has had rapid advancements in science and technology since the time of the Indus Valley Civilization . If one were to evaluate advancement in antiquity, investigations have shown that,

In India, science and religion were closely related. The various fields of science underwent several advancements in antiquity. In the fields of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, metallurgy, geography, biology, chemistry, agriculture, etc., we discover advancements in various aspects of science.

Mathematics

• Ancient India’s contributions to mathematics are profound and well-documented. Aryabhata, one of the earliest Indian mathematicians, introduced the concept of zero as a number and made significant contributions to the field of trigonometry and algebra.
• His most famous work, Aryabhatiya, details astronomical observations and theories that suggest the Earth’s rotation on its axis.
• Another notable mathematician, Brahmagupta, provided rules for arithmetic operations involving zero and negative numbers, and he also worked on equations that were to become the basis for algebra.
• Indian astronomy was highly advanced for its time, with scholars like Aryabhata and Varahamihira making significant contributions.
• The concept of a heliocentric solar system, as well as the understanding of eclipses and the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, were subjects of study.
• The Surya Siddhanta, a treatise on astronomy, contains remarkably accurate calculations of the lengths of the solar year and the sizes and distances of the planets from the Earth.

• The craft and science of metallurgy were highly advanced in ancient India, with the most famous example being the Iron Pillar of Delhi.
• This pillar is a testament to the high skill level in ironworking and corrosion resistance.
• The wootz steel, produced in India since ancient times, was exported across the world and is the precursor to modern high-quality steel alloys.

Medical Science (Ayurveda)

• Ayurveda , the traditional system of medicine in India, was highly developed in ancient times.
• Texts like the Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita are foundational works that detail surgical procedures, medicinal plants, and a holistic approach to health and wellness.
• Sushruta, known as the father of surgery, described surgical techniques and instruments that are astonishingly advanced for their time.

Architecture and Engineering

• The architectural and engineering achievements of ancient and medieval India are seen in its temples, palaces, and urban planning.
• The concept of Vastu Shastra, an ancient Indian science of architecture and building, guided the construction of buildings and cities harmoniously integrated with nature.
• The step-wells of Gujarat and Rajasthan are examples of advanced engineering and water management systems.
• The ancient Indians also made significant strides in chemistry, known as Rasashastra.
• It involved the extraction of metals, the manufacture of alloys, and the preparation of medicinal compounds. This knowledge was applied in various fields, including medicine and metallurgy.
• India’s contribution to textiles, particularly cotton and silk weaving and dyeing, was significant.
• Techniques for spinning, weaving, dyeing, and printing were highly sophisticated, contributing to a flourishing trade both within and outside India.

Developments in Science and Technology in Modern India

The government of India has adequately acknowledged the contribution that science and technology have made to the country’s progress. The Second Five-Year Plan emphasized that “the community’s readiness to apply modern science and technology is the most significant single component in supporting economic development.”

• To support emerging fields of research and technology, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) was established in 1971. At the state level, State Councils of Science and Technology have also been established.
• India has advanced greatly in many other domains in addition to these important ones. These include the exploration and refinement of oil by the Oil and Natural Gas Commission and the production of solar energy by the National Committee of Environment Planning.
• To control pollution in the Ganga River , the Central Ganga Authority was established. The nation currently has a solid foundation in modem technology.
• The relatively strict intellectual property laws in India will help the country become a significant R&D hub.

Space Research

India’s space program, spearheaded by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), stands out as one of the most successful in the world.

• ISRO’s achievements include the Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan) , which made India the first Asian nation to reach Martian orbit and the first in the world to do so in its maiden attempt.
• The Chandrayaan missions aimed at exploring the moon have placed India among the elite group of countries that have mastered the technology for space exploration. Additionally, ISRO has developed a series of indigenous satellites and launch vehicles, such as the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) and Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) , enhancing India’s capability in remote sensing, communication, and navigation.

Information Technology and Software Services

R&D projects are increasingly being outsourced to India. More than 1,100 R&D centers have been established by multinational corporations (MNCs), including IBM, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Lupin, Wockhardt, and others. Information and communication technologies, biotechnology, aircraft, automotive, chemicals, and materials technology are all covered by these R&D facilities.

• India has emerged as a global hub for information technology (IT) and software services, contributing significantly to the global IT workforce.
• Indian IT firms like Infosys, TCS, and Wipro are recognized globally for their software development, IT services, and outsourcing solutions.
• The country’s IT sector has been a critical driver of economic growth, generating millions of jobs and significantly contributing to India’s GDP.

Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industry

• India’s biotechnology sector has grown exponentially, with advancements in genetic engineering, stem cell research, and the development of vaccines and biopharmaceuticals.
• The Indian pharmaceutical industry , known as the “pharmacy of the world,” is a leader in the production of generic drugs, supplying affordable medicines to various countries.
• Indian companies like Biocon and Serum Institute of India play crucial roles in drug development and vaccine production, contributing to global health initiatives.

Renewable Energy

• India’s commitment to renewable energy is evident in its ambitious targets and projects in solar, wind, and hydroelectric power.
• The International Solar Alliance (ISA) , co-founded by India, aims to harness solar energy globally, especially in countries rich in solar potential.
• The country’s push for renewable energy is part of its broader efforts to combat climate change and reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

Nuclear and Defense Technology

• India has made significant advancements in nuclear technology and defense. It has developed nuclear reactors for energy production and is a member of the select group of countries with indigenous capabilities to design and build nuclear-powered submarines.
• In defense, India is focusing on self-reliance through the development of various indigenous systems, including missiles (Agni and Prithvi series), fighter jets (Tejas), and other advanced military technologies.

Digital India Initiative

• The Digital India initiative aims to transform the country into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.
• It focuses on improving online infrastructure, increasing internet connectivity, and making government services electronically available to citizens. This initiative has led to significant advancements in digital payments, e-governance, and internet accessibility across the country.
• In terms of the number of startups , India is currently the third-largest nation. In the upcoming years, it is anticipated that this number will increase tremendously.
• The Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) was established by the government to drastically change the nation’s innovation, entrepreneurship, and start-up ecosystems.

Global participation

The government is sponsoring numerous research and development programs as part of the national policy to boost scientific activities. Thus, we discover that scientific knowledge and modern technology have had an impact on practically every field, including ocean development, nuclear energy, space technology, electronics, agriculture, and industry.

• Leading some groundbreaking research being done around the world are scientists from India. It has been exciting to see recent advancements in frontier science and technology made by Indian scientists.
• For instance, 37 Indian scientists from nine Indian institutes were instrumental in the gravitational wave discovery that won the 2017 Physics Nobel Prize .
• The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) , located in the United States, discovered a neutron star merger with the assistance of Indian scientists.
• Additionally, it boasts the third-largest technical and scientific labor force in the entire world.

Developments in Science and Technology-Effects in Everyday Life

Every day of the year, from the moment we wake up until the time we go to bed, science and technology have an impact on all of us. Science has given us many things, including our digital alarm clock, the weather report, the cars we drive and the buses we ride, our choice to eat a baked potato rather than fries, our cell phones, the antibiotics that treat sore throats, the clean water, and the light. Developments in Science and technology have impacted both Socialization and productivity.

• Because of the internet’s strength, it is now easier to share ideas and resources and to create global communities. Without the knowledge and technologies made possible by science, the modern world would not even remotely be modern.
• Science has a rising impact on people’s lives. Even while the benefits to humanity in recent decades have been unsurpassed in the history of the human species, there have been certain cases where the influence has been negative or the long-term implications raise grave concerns.
• Today, there is a sizable amount of popular skepticism about science and anxiety around technology. This is partly due to the perception held by some people and communities that they will be the ones to experience the unintended negative effects of technological advancements made to benefit a wealthy minority.
• Because research can effect change, scientists have a responsibility to act and speak with extreme prudence. Scientists ought to consider the social repercussions of technological applications or the dissemination of incomplete information resulting from their work, and they ought to explain to the general public and decision-makers the level of scientific uncertainty or incompleteness in their conclusions.
• To help people adapt to environmental change, they should also not be afraid to fully utilize the predictive capacity of science when done right, especially in situations where there are immediate concerns like natural disasters or water shortages.
• The S&T sector offers straightforward, reasonably priced scientific solutions that enable people to save time and effort and increase their revenue. Technologies provide value to the goods produced by the cottage and small-scale industries, boosting their competitiveness.
• By focusing on computer literacy and making IT accessible to individuals without formal schooling, S&T can, in general, play a significant role in bringing IT to the most isolated regions of the nation.
• Thus, via skill development and training that is activity-oriented, supporting the growth of entrepreneurship, and promoting self-employment using new technologies, the “problem population” can be transformed into an important “human resource.”
• S&T provides solutions for short-term issues like switching to non-conventional energy sources and product packaging as well as long-term issues like drought, epidemics, drinking water shortages, nutrition, sanitation, health, and housing.
• Through the use of environmentally friendly technology, S&T knowledge can be used to create ways to encourage people to develop the habit of using natural resources like wood, bamboo, medicinal plants, etc. more wisely.

Developments in Science and Technology and Society

In the past 200 years, the wealthier sectors of the human race have primarily exploited science as a tool for military might and economic advancement. It is increasingly obvious that the existing use of natural resources and growing strains on the local and regional environment cannot go on indefinitely without the breakdown of the natural support systems that enable current civilizations.

Science, which played a role in creating this scenario, now bears the primary duty of assisting societies in moving away from a fixation with growth and toward the development of an ecological and economic system that is dynamically stable and sustainable.

An alliance between contemporary technical science with the universal knowledge of indigenous societies and philosophers from all cultures can be crucial throughout this transition.

The pace of change in both natural and human conditions and problems is predicted to increase in the twenty-first century.

Scientists have a growing responsibility to work with policymakers and the general public to find and implement solutions or means of adaptation to issues that are both local and global, such as balancing the current competitive profit motive with the common good; allowing contributions from and benefits to marginalized elements of society and minority cultures; justifying current expenditures to avoid costs or damages to future generations; and rewarding scientific achievement.

There has never been a more crucial time for Developments in Science and Technology to influence and progress society and government.

Article written by Aseem Muhammed

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Essay on Science and Technology for Students in 1300 Words

In this article, we have published an essay on science and technology for students in 1300 words.

Scientific advances picked up their full tilt in the 20th generation and became more rapid in the 21st generation. We are now entering a new century with structures for the benefit of new ways or men.

Table of Contents

Throughout the world’s history, science may have come a long way. Some of the elements we know about are the discovery of a person’s evolution. Science was instrumental in providing people with answers in common questions as well as providing solutions to many of the issues we face each day.

It also helps its employer to limit the number of losses caused by paying more money for manual labor, and that this helps since machines will also be extremely efficient and price-effective.

Aspects of Science & Technology

Likewise, science and technology also influenced the scientific and agriculture sectors. The numerous treatments that are found for illnesses have saved millions of lives by research. The development has improved the output of different crops to the advantage of farmers in large part.

Advantages & Disadvantages of Science and Technology

Use apps, you can find your daily work simpler. You need to learn about every division of existence, such as industry, schooling, safety, and connectivity, etc. and figure out how to use and utilize technology.

Disadvantages

Science & technology in india.

India is in negotiations all over the planet since before the British rule. Since freedom, it is the modern technology that enabled India to progress over time. It has become a vital hub of innovative and ground-breaking scientific advances around the globe. In other terms, the Indian economy has been boosted by all the tremendous scientific and technological achievements of our world.

The implementation of academic research, innovations, and methods in the education field also brought a massive shift in the future generation but has provided several new and creative opportunities in their very own interest.

Looking at the most recent accomplishment, India has launched Chandrayaan 2. The lunar discovery of India also received critical acclaim from around the globe. Once again, success has been made possible by scientific and technological.

The Bottom Line

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Technology over the long run: zoom out to see how dramatically the world can change within a lifetime

It is easy to underestimate how much the world can change within a lifetime. considering how dramatically the world has changed can help us see how different the world could be in a few years or decades..

Technology can change the world in ways that are unimaginable until they happen. Switching on an electric light would have been unimaginable for our medieval ancestors. In their childhood, our grandparents would have struggled to imagine a world connected by smartphones and the Internet.

Similarly, it is hard for us to imagine the arrival of all those technologies that will fundamentally change the world we are used to.

We can remind ourselves that our own future might look very different from the world today by looking back at how rapidly technology has changed our world in the past. That’s what this article is about.

One insight I take away from this long-term perspective is how unusual our time is. Technological change was extremely slow in the past – the technologies that our ancestors got used to in their childhood were still central to their lives in their old age. In stark contrast to those days, we live in a time of extraordinarily fast technological change. For recent generations, it was common for technologies that were unimaginable in their youth to become common later in life.

The long-run perspective on technological change

The big visualization offers a long-term perspective on the history of technology. 1

The timeline begins at the center of the spiral. The first use of stone tools, 3.4 million years ago, marks the beginning of this history of technology. 2 Each turn of the spiral represents 200,000 years of history. It took 2.4 million years – 12 turns of the spiral – for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking. 3

To be able to visualize the inventions in the more recent past – the last 12,000 years – I had to unroll the spiral. I needed more space to be able to show when agriculture, writing, and the wheel were invented. During this period, technological change was faster, but it was still relatively slow: several thousand years passed between each of these three inventions.

From 1800 onwards, I stretched out the timeline even further to show the many major inventions that rapidly followed one after the other.

The long-term perspective that this chart provides makes it clear just how unusually fast technological change is in our time.

You can use this visualization to see how technology developed in particular domains. Follow, for example, the history of communication: from writing to paper, to the printing press, to the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, all the way to the Internet and smartphones.

Or follow the rapid development of human flight. In 1903, the Wright brothers took the first flight in human history (they were in the air for less than a minute), and just 66 years later, we landed on the moon. Many people saw both within their lifetimes: the first plane and the moon landing.

This large visualization also highlights the wide range of technology’s impact on our lives. It includes extraordinarily beneficial innovations, such as the vaccine that allowed humanity to eradicate smallpox , and it includes terrible innovations, like the nuclear bombs that endanger the lives of all of us .

What will the next decades bring?

The red timeline reaches up to the present and then continues in green into the future. Many children born today, even without further increases in life expectancy, will live well into the 22nd century.

New vaccines, progress in clean, low-carbon energy, better cancer treatments – a range of future innovations could very much improve our living conditions and the environment around us. But, as I argue in a series of articles , there is one technology that could even more profoundly change our world: artificial intelligence (AI).

One reason why artificial intelligence is such an important innovation is that intelligence is the main driver of innovation itself. This fast-paced technological change could speed up even more if it’s driven not only by humanity’s intelligence but also by artificial intelligence. If this happens, the change currently stretched out over decades might happen within a very brief time span of just a year. Possibly even faster. 4

I think AI technology could have a fundamentally transformative impact on our world. In many ways, it is already changing our world, as I documented in this companion article . As this technology becomes more capable in the years and decades to come, it can give immense power to those who control it (and it poses the risk that it could escape our control entirely).

Such systems might seem hard to imagine today, but AI technology is advancing quickly. Many AI experts believe there is a real chance that human-level artificial intelligence will be developed within the next decades, as I documented in this article .

Technology will continue to change the world – we should all make sure that it changes it for the better

What is familiar to us today – photography, the radio, antibiotics, the Internet, or the International Space Station circling our planet – was unimaginable to our ancestors just a few generations ago. If your great-great-great grandparents could spend a week with you, they would be blown away by your everyday life.

What I take away from this history is that I will likely see technologies in my lifetime that appear unimaginable to me today.

In addition to this trend towards increasingly rapid innovation, there is a second long-run trend. Technology has become increasingly powerful. While our ancestors wielded stone tools, we are building globe-spanning AI systems and technologies that can edit our genes.

Because of the immense power that technology gives those who control it, there is little that is as important as the question of which technologies get developed during our lifetimes. Therefore, I think it is a mistake to leave the question about the future of technology to the technologists. Which technologies are controlled by whom is one of the most important political questions of our time because of the enormous power these technologies convey to those who control them.

We all should strive to gain the knowledge we need to contribute to an intelligent debate about the world we want to live in. To a large part, this means gaining knowledge and wisdom on the question of which technologies we want.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank my colleagues Hannah Ritchie, Bastian Herre, Natasha Ahuja, Edouard Mathieu, Daniel Bachler, Charlie Giattino, and Pablo Rosado for their helpful comments on drafts of this essay and the visualization. Thanks also to Lizka Vaintrob and Ben Clifford for the conversation that initiated this visualization.

Appendix: About the choice of visualization in this article

The recent speed of technological change makes it difficult to picture the history of technology in one visualization. When you visualize this development on a linear timeline, then most of the timeline is almost empty, while all the action is crammed into the right corner:

In my large visualization here, I tried to avoid this problem and instead show the long history of technology in a way that lets you see when each technological breakthrough happened and how, within the last millennia, there was a continuous acceleration of technological change.

The recent speed of technological change makes it difficult to picture the history of technology in one visualization. In the appendix, I show how this would look if it were linear.

It is, of course, difficult to assess when exactly the first stone tools were used.

The research by McPherron et al. (2010) suggested that it was at least 3.39 million years ago. This is based on two fossilized bones found in Dikika in Ethiopia, which showed “stone-tool cut marks for flesh removal and percussion marks for marrow access”. These marks were interpreted as being caused by meat consumption and provide the first evidence that one of our ancestors, Australopithecus afarensis, used stone tools.

The research by Harmand et al. (2015) provided evidence for stone tool use in today’s Kenya 3.3 million years ago.

References:

McPherron et al. (2010) – Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia . Published in Nature.

Harmand et al. (2015) – 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya . Published in Nature.

Evidence for controlled fire use approximately 1 million years ago is provided by Berna et al. (2012) Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa , published in PNAS.

The authors write: “The ability to control fire was a crucial turning point in human evolution, but the question of when hominins first developed this ability still remains. Here we show that micromorphological and Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (mFTIR) analyses of intact sediments at the site of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa, provide unambiguous evidence—in the form of burned bone and ashed plant remains—that burning took place in the cave during the early Acheulean occupation, approximately 1.0 Ma. To the best of our knowledge, this is the earliest secure evidence for burning in an archaeological context.”

This is what authors like Holden Karnofsky called ‘Process for Automating Scientific and Technological Advancement’ or PASTA. Some recent developments go in this direction: DeepMind’s AlphaFold helped to make progress on one of the large problems in biology, and they have also developed an AI system that finds new algorithms that are relevant to building a more powerful AI.

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Science, technology and innovation in a 21st century context

• Published: 27 August 2011
• Volume 44 , pages 209–213, ( 2011 )

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• John H. Marburger III 1  

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Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

This editorial essay was prepared by John H. “Jack” Marburger for a workshop on the “science of science and innovation policy” held in 2009 that was the basis for this special issue. It is published posthumously .

Linking the words “science,” “technology,” and “innovation,” may suggest that we know more about how these activities are related than we really do. This very common linkage implicitly conveys a linear progression from scientific research to technology creation to innovative products. More nuanced pictures of these complex activities break them down into components that interact with each other in a multi-dimensional socio-technological-economic network. A few examples will help to make this clear.

Science has always functioned on two levels that we may describe as curiosity-driven and need-driven, and they interact in sometimes surprising ways. Galileo’s telescope, the paradigmatic instrument of discovery in pure science, emerged from an entirely pragmatic tradition of lens-making for eye-glasses. And we should keep in mind that the industrial revolution gave more to science than it received, at least until the last half of the nineteenth century when the sciences of chemistry and electricity began to produce serious economic payoffs. The flowering of science during the era, we call the enlightenment owed much to its links with crafts and industry, but as it gained momentum science created its own need for practical improvements. After all, the frontiers of science are defined by the capabilities of instrumentation, that is, of technology. The needs of pure science are a huge but poorly understood stimulus for technologies that have the capacity to be disruptive precisely because these needs do not arise from the marketplace. The innovators who built the World Wide Web on the foundation of the Internet were particle physicists at CERN, struggling to satisfy their unique need to share complex information. Others soon discovered “needs” of which they had been unaware that could be satisfied by this innovation, and from that point the Web transformed the Internet from a tool for the technological elite into a broad platform for a new kind of economy.

Necessity is said to be the mother of invention, but in all human societies, “necessity” is a mix of culturally conditioned perceptions and the actual physical necessities of life. The concept of need, of what is wanted, is the ultimate driver of markets and an essential dimension of innovation. And as the example of the World Wide Web shows, need is very difficult to identify before it reveals itself in a mass movement. Why did I not know I needed a cell phone before nearly everyone else had one? Because until many others had one I did not, in fact, need one. Innovation has this chicken-and-egg quality that makes it extremely hard to analyze. We all know of visionaries who conceive of a society totally transformed by their invention and who are bitter that the world has not embraced their idea. Sometimes we think of them as crackpots, or simply unrealistic about what it takes to change the world. We practical people necessarily view the world through the filter of what exists, and fail to anticipate disruptive change. Nearly always we are surprised by the rapid acceptance of a transformative idea. If we truly want to encourage innovation through government policies, we are going to have to come to grips with this deep unpredictability of the mass acceptance of a new concept. Works analyzing this phenomenon are widely popular under titles like “ The Tipping Point ” by Gladwell ( 2000 ) or more recently the book by Taleb ( 2007 ) called The Black Swan , among others.

What causes innovations to be adopted and integrated into economies depends on their ability to satisfy some perceived need by consumers, and that perception may be an artifact of marketing, or fashion, or cultural inertia, or ignorance. Some of the largest and most profitable industries in the developed world—entertainment, automobiles, clothing and fashion accessories, health products, children’s toys, grownups’ toys!—depend on perceptions of need that go far beyond the utilitarian and are notoriously difficult to predict. And yet these industries clearly depend on sophisticated and rapidly advancing technologies to compete in the marketplace. Of course, they do not depend only upon technology. Technologies are part of the environment for innovation, or in a popular and very appropriate metaphor—part of the innovation ecology .

This complexity of innovation and its ecology is conveyed in Chapter One of a currently popular best-seller in the United States called Innovation Nation by the American innovation guru, Kao ( 2007 ), formerly on the faculty of the Harvard Business School:

“I define it [innovation],” writes Kao, “as the ability of individuals, companies, and entire nations to continuously create their desired future. Innovation depends on harvesting knowledge from a range of disciplines besides science and technology, among them design, social science, and the arts. And it is exemplified by more than just products; services, experiences, and processes can be innovative as well. The work of entrepreneurs, scientists, and software geeks alike contributes to innovation. It is also about the middlemen who know how to realize value from ideas. Innovation flows from shifts in mind-set that can generate new business models, recognize new opportunities, and weave innovations throughout the fabric of society. It is about new ways of doing and seeing things as much as it is about the breakthrough idea.” (Kao 2007 , p. 19).

This is not your standard government-type definition. Gurus, of course, do not have to worry about leading indicators and predictive measures of policy success. Nevertheless, some policy guidance can be drawn from this high level “definition,” and I will do so later.

The first point, then, is that the structural aspects of “science, technology, and innovation” are imperfectly defined, complex, and poorly understood. There is still much work to do to identify measures, develop models, and test them against actual experience before we can say we really know what it takes to foster innovation. The second point I want to make is about the temporal aspects: all three of these complex activities are changing with time. Science, of course, always changes through the accumulation of knowledge, but it also changes through revolutions in its theoretical structure, through its ever-improving technology, and through its evolving sociology. The technology and sociology of science are currently impacted by a rapidly changing information technology. Technology today flows increasingly from research laboratories but the influence of technology on both science and innovation depends strongly on its commercial adoption, that is, on market forces. Commercial scale manufacturing drives down the costs of technology so it can be exploited in an ever-broadening range of applications. The mass market for precision electro-mechanical devices like cameras, printers, and disk drives is the basis for new scientific instrumentation and also for further generations of products that integrate hundreds of existing components in new devices and business models like the Apple iPod and video games, not to mention improvements in old products like cars and telephones. Innovation is changing too as it expands its scope beyond individual products to include all or parts of systems such as supply chains and inventory control, as in the Wal-Mart phenomenon. Apple’s iPod does not stand alone; it is integrated with iTunes software and novel arrangements with media providers.

With one exception, however, technology changes more slowly than it appears because we encounter basic technology platforms in a wide variety of relatively short-lived products. Technology is like a language that innovators use to express concepts in the form of products, and business models that serve (and sometimes create) a variety of needs, some of which fluctuate with fashion. The exception to the illusion of rapid technology change is the pace of information technology, which is no illusion. It has fulfilled Moore’s Law for more than half a century, and it is a remarkable historical anomaly arising from the systematic exploitation of the understanding of the behavior of microscopic matter following the discovery of quantum mechanics. The pace would be much less without a continually evolving market for the succession of smaller, higher capacity products. It is not at all clear that the market demand will continue to support the increasingly expensive investment in fabrication equipment for each new step up the exponential curve of Moore’s Law. The science is probably available to allow many more capacity doublings if markets can sustain them. Let me digress briefly on this point.

Many science commentators have described the twentieth century as the century of physics and the twenty-first as the century of biology. We now know that is misleading. It is true that our struggle to understand the ultimate constituents of matter has now encompassed (apparently) everything of human scale and relevance, and that the universe of biological phenomena now lies open for systematic investigation and dramatic applications in health, agriculture, and energy production. But there are two additional frontiers of physical science, one already highly productive, the other very intriguing. The first is the frontier of complexity , where physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, and mathematics all come together. This is where nanotechnology and biotechnology reside. These are huge fields that form the core of basic science policy in most developed nations. The basic science of the twenty-first century is neither biology nor physics, but an interdisciplinary mix of these and other traditional fields. Continued development of this domain contributes to information technology and much else. I mentioned two frontiers. The other physical science frontier borders the nearly unexploited domain of quantum coherence phenomena . It is a very large domain and potentially a source of entirely new platform technologies not unlike microelectronics. To say more about this would take me too far from our topic. The point is that nature has many undeveloped physical phenomena to enrich the ecology of innovation and keep us marching along the curve of Moore’s Law if we can afford to do so.

I worry about the psychological impact of the rapid advance of information technology. I believe it has created unrealistic expectations about all technologies and has encouraged a casual attitude among policy makers toward the capability of science and technology to deliver solutions to difficult social problems. This is certainly true of what may be the greatest technical challenge of all time—the delivery of energy to large developed and developing populations without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The challenge of sustainable energy technology is much more difficult than many people currently seem to appreciate. I am afraid that time will make this clear.

Structural complexities and the intrinsic dynamism of science and technology pose challenges to policy makers, but they seem almost manageable compared with the challenges posed by extrinsic forces. Among these are globalization and the impact of global economic development on the environment. The latter, expressed quite generally through the concept of “sustainability” is likely to be a component of much twenty-first century innovation policy. Measures of development, competitiveness, and innovation need to include sustainability dimensions to be realistic over the long run. Development policies that destroy economically important environmental systems, contribute to harmful global change, and undermine the natural resource basis of the economy are bad policies. Sustainability is now an international issue because the scale of development and the globalization of economies have environmental and natural resource implications that transcend national borders.

From the policy point of view, globalization is a not a new phenomenon. Science has been globalized for centuries, and we ought to be studying it more closely as a model for effective responses to the globalization of our economies. What is striking about science is the strong imperative to share ideas through every conceivable channel to the widest possible audience. If you had to name one chief characteristic of science, it would be empiricism. If you had to name two, the other would be open communication of data and ideas. The power of open communication in science cannot be overestimated. It has established, uniquely among human endeavors, an absolute global standard. And it effectively recruits talent from every part of the globe to labor at the science frontiers. The result has been an extraordinary legacy of understanding of the phenomena that shape our existence. Science is the ultimate example of an open innovation system.

Science practice has received much attention from philosophers, social scientists, and historians during the past half-century, and some of what has been learned holds valuable lessons for policy makers. It is fascinating to me how quickly countries that provide avenues to advanced education are able to participate in world science. The barriers to a small but productive scientific activity appear to be quite low and whether or not a country participates in science appears to be discretionary. A small scientific establishment, however, will not have significant direct economic impact. Its value at early stages of development is indirect, bringing higher performance standards, international recognition, and peer role models for a wider population. A science program of any size is also a link to the rich intellectual resources of the world scientific community. The indirect benefit of scientific research to a developing country far exceeds its direct benefit, and policy needs to recognize this. It is counterproductive to base support for science in such countries on a hoped-for direct economic stimulus.

Keeping in mind that the innovation ecology includes far more than science and technology, it should be obvious that within a small national economy innovation can thrive on a very small indigenous science and technology base. But innovators, like scientists, do require access to technical information and ideas. Consequently, policies favorable to innovation will create access to education and encourage free communication with the world technical community. Anything that encourages awareness of the marketplace and all its actors on every scale will encourage innovation.

This brings me back to John Kao’s definition of innovation. His vision of “the ability of individuals, companies, and entire nations to continuously create their desired future” implies conditions that create that ability, including most importantly educational opportunity (Kao 2007 , p. 19). The notion that “innovation depends on harvesting knowledge from a range of disciplines besides science and technology” implies that innovators must know enough to recognize useful knowledge when they see it, and that they have access to knowledge sources across a spectrum that ranges from news media and the Internet to technical and trade conferences (2007, p. 19). If innovation truly “flows from shifts in mind-set that can generate new business models, recognize new opportunities, and weave innovations throughout the fabric of society,” then the fabric of society must be somewhat loose-knit to accommodate the new ideas (2007, p. 19). Innovation is about risk and change, and deep forces in every society resist both of these. A striking feature of the US innovation ecology is the positive attitude toward failure, an attitude that encourages risk-taking and entrepreneurship.

All this gives us some insight into what policies we need to encourage innovation. Innovation policy is broader than science and technology policy, but the latter must be consistent with the former to produce a healthy innovation ecology. Innovation requires a predictable social structure, an open marketplace, and a business culture amenable to risk and change. It certainly requires an educational infrastructure that produces people with a global awareness and sufficient technical literacy to harvest the fruits of current technology. What innovation does not require is the creation by governments of a system that defines, regulates, or even rewards innovation except through the marketplace or in response to evident success. Some regulation of new products and new ideas is required to protect public health and environmental quality, but innovation needs lots of freedom. Innovative ideas that do not work out should be allowed to die so the innovation community can learn from the experience and replace the failed attempt with something better.

Do we understand innovation well enough to develop policy for it? If the policy addresses very general infrastructure issues such as education, economic, and political stability and the like, the answer is perhaps. If we want to measure the impact of specific programs on innovation, the answer is no. Studies of innovation are at an early stage where anecdotal information and case studies, similar to John Kao’s book—or the books on Business Week’s top ten list of innovation titles—are probably the most useful tools for policy makers.

I have been urging increased attention to what I call the science of science policy —the systematic quantitative study of the subset of our economy called science and technology—including the construction and validation of micro- and macro-economic models for S&T activity. Innovators themselves, and those who finance them, need to identify their needs and the impediments they face. Eventually, we may learn enough to create reliable indicators by which we can judge the health of our innovation ecosystems. The goal is well worth the sustained effort that will be required to achieve it.

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Kao, J. (2007). Innovation nation: How America is losing its innovation edge, why it matters, and what we can do to get it back . New York: Free Press.

Taleb, N. N. (2007). The black swan: The impact of the highly improbable . New York: Random House.

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Marburger, J.H. Science, technology and innovation in a 21st century context. Policy Sci 44 , 209–213 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-011-9137-3

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-011-9137-3

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Essay on Science and Technology

Science and technology are the driving forces behind the progress and innovations that shape our modern world. From smartphones to space exploration, these two fields have transformed the way we live, work, and interact. In this essay, we will explore the incredible importance of science and technology in our lives, demonstrating how they have improved our society and continue to hold great promise for the future.

Advancements in Healthcare

Science and technology have revolutionized healthcare, improving the quality of our lives. Breakthroughs in medical research and technology have led to the development of life-saving treatments and medications. According to the World Health Organization, advancements in medical science have increased life expectancy worldwide by six years in the last two decades.

Enhancing Communication

The evolution of technology has transformed communication. The invention of the internet, smartphones, and social media platforms has made it easier for people around the globe to connect and share information. For instance, the Pew Research Center reports that over 3.6 billion people use social media, fostering global connections and communication.

Fueling Economic Growth

Science and technology drive economic growth by fostering innovation and creating new industries. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the information technology sector alone has accounted for a significant portion of economic growth in recent decades, offering countless job opportunities.

Space Exploration and Scientific Discovery

Space exploration, made possible by advances in technology, continues to expand our understanding of the universe. NASA’s Mars rovers, for example, have sent back valuable data about the red planet, furthering our knowledge of space and potential for future colonization.

Environmental Conservation

Science and technology play a pivotal role in addressing environmental challenges. Solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles are just a few examples of green technologies that help reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change. The Union of Concerned Scientists notes that these technologies are essential for a sustainable future.

The Power of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is another groundbreaking field driven by science and technology. AI applications like voice assistants and self-driving cars are becoming increasingly integrated into our daily lives. According to Statista, the AI market is projected to reach $190 billion by 2025, revolutionizing various industries.

Advancing Education

Technology has transformed education by providing innovative learning tools. E-learning platforms, interactive educational apps, and online courses have made education accessible to people worldwide. UNESCO reports that technology has expanded learning opportunities, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fostering Scientific Research

Science and technology enable scientists to conduct experiments and gather data more efficiently. High-tech laboratories and equipment, such as electron microscopes and gene sequencers, accelerate research. The National Institutes of Health emphasizes that these tools are essential for scientific progress.

Conclusion of Essay on Science and Technology

In conclusion, science and technology are the driving engines of progress and innovation in our world. They have improved healthcare, enhanced communication, fueled economic growth, and expanded our understanding of the universe. Moreover, these fields hold the key to solving pressing environmental challenges, revolutionizing education, and fostering scientific discovery. As we look to the future, science and technology will continue to play a vital role in shaping a better and more connected world for all. Embracing and supporting these marvels of human achievement is essential for our collective well-being and the advancement of society.

Also Check: 500+ Words Essay on Should Plastic be Banned

Science and Technology in India, Progress, Achievements, and Concerns

Science and technology have played a pivotal role in shaping India's modern identity and driving its socio-economic development. Know all Achievements Science and Technology in India.

Table of Contents

Science and technology have played a pivotal role in shaping India’s modern identity and driving its socio-economic development. With a rich history dating back centuries, India has made significant strides in recent years, positioning itself as a global player in the field of science and technology.

Science and Technology in India

Science and technology have significantly influenced India’s development. With a rich historical legacy, India has made remarkable strides in recent times. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has gained global acclaim with missions to the moon and Mars, while the IT and pharmaceutical sectors are thriving. These advancements have driven economic growth, improved healthcare, and strengthened the agricultural sector. However, India must address funding, education, and digital access disparities to maintain this momentum and ensure technology benefits all.

History of science and technology in India

India’s history of science and technology is a tapestry of remarkable accomplishments spanning millennia. Ancient Indian mathematicians blazed a trail with the invention of the decimal system and the concept of zero, while astronomers made precise celestial observations. The “Sushruta Samhita” demonstrated advanced surgical knowledge, and India’s metallurgical expertise was renowned. The medieval period witnessed architectural marvels like the Taj Mahal. British colonialism influenced the growth of modern scientific institutions.

Post-independence, India prioritized education and research, giving rise to institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Contemporary India excels in space exploration, IT, pharmaceuticals, and renewable energy, solidifying its global stature in science and technology. Science and technology have always been integral to Indian culture, with a rich tradition of natural philosophy. The Indian Renaissance, coinciding with the independence struggle, saw significant progress by Indian scientists. Post-independence, the government established robust S&T infrastructure, with the Department of Science and Technology playing a pivotal role.

Role of Science & Technology in India

The role of science and technology in India is pivotal, with significant contributions to the nation’s development and progress. This role can be understood through various dimensions:

Economic Growth

Science and technology play a critical role in driving economic growth. They underpin various industries, including information technology, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and manufacturing. India’s burgeoning software and IT services sector, in particular, has led to substantial foreign exchange earnings and job creation. The advancements in these industries have significantly contributed to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and overall economic development.

Agricultural Transformation

Science and technology have been instrumental in transforming India’s agriculture sector. The Green Revolution, initiated in the mid-20th century, introduced high-yield crop varieties, modern irrigation techniques, and improved agricultural practices. These innovations increased agricultural productivity, ensuring food security for the growing population.

Healthcare Advancements

Technological advancements in the field of medicine have improved healthcare outcomes in India. Advanced medical equipment, telemedicine, and innovative treatment methods have enhanced the quality of healthcare services. India has also become a prominent player in pharmaceuticals, producing a wide range of affordable generic drugs and vaccines.

Education and Research

Science and technology have fostered a culture of innovation and research in India. The establishment of institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs), and world-class research facilities has nurtured a new generation of scientists and engineers. These institutions have not only contributed to cutting-edge research but have also attracted international collaborations.

Space Exploration

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has achieved significant milestones in space exploration. India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan) in 2013 marked its entry into interplanetary space exploration. ISRO’s missions have contributed to advancements in communication, remote sensing, and global positioning systems, benefiting a wide range of sectors, including agriculture, disaster management, and urban planning.

Global Contributions

India has become a global contributor in science and technology. Its space missions and pharmaceutical industry have not only served domestic needs but have also had a global impact. India’s information technology sector provides crucial services to businesses and organizations around the world. The nation’s scientists and engineers are increasingly engaged in collaborative research projects with international partners, contributing to global scientific advancements.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Science and technology have fostered innovation and entrepreneurship. Start-ups in the technology, biotechnology, and clean energy sectors have gained prominence, attracting investments and generating job opportunities. India’s government and private sector actively support the growth of a vibrant start-up ecosystem.

Recent Developments of science and technology in India

India has a rich history of remarkable achievements in the field of science and technology, spanning from ancient innovations to modern breakthroughs. Here are some notable contributions:

Revolutionizing Agriculture

India’s Green Revolution, a monumental achievement, transformed the country’s agricultural landscape. Agro-scientists introduced high-yielding seeds, modern farming techniques, and improved irrigation practices. As a result, India became self-sufficient in food production, reducing reliance on foreign grain imports and ensuring food security.

Pioneering Satellite Communication

Under the visionary leadership of Vikram Sarabhai, India ventured into space technology. The successful launch of the Space Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) and the INSAT system in 1983 established India as a significant player in satellite communication. This achievement has had a profound impact on telecommunications, broadcasting, and weather forecasting.

Global Pharmaceutical Hub

India has earned its reputation as “the pharmacy of the world.” Government initiatives, including the establishment of Hindustan Antibiotics Limited and Indian Drugs and Pharmaceuticals Limited, along with private sector contributions, have led to the production of affordable and effective drugs and vaccines with a global impact.

Indigenous Defence Advancements

The Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) has been pivotal in developing indigenous defence systems, including advanced aircraft, weaponry, tanks, electronic warfare technologies, and missile systems. India’s successful nuclear tests in 1974 and 1998 have reinforced national security and sovereignty.

Space Exploration Excellence

The establishment of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in 1969 marked a significant milestone. ISRO’s missions, including Chandrayaan (2008) and Mangalyaan (2014), have propelled India to the forefront of space exploration. India became the first nation to reach the orbit of Mars on its maiden attempt, expanding our knowledge of celestial bodies.

Global IT Dominance

The establishment of the Department of Electronics in 1970, coupled with the emergence of public sector companies like ECIL and CMC, challenged the dominance of global IT giants. Today, India stands as the world’s largest exporter of IT services, with companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) ranking among the top 10 IT firms globally, contributing significantly to the nation’s economic growth and technological prowess.

Achievements of India in Science and Technology

In the realm of space exploration, India has achieved notable milestones through the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). ISRO has successfully launched numerous satellites for communication, Earth observation, and navigation. The Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan), launched in 2013, marked a historic achievement, making India the fourth country in the world to reach Mars on its maiden attempt. Additionally, the Chandrayaan-2 mission was launched to explore the Moon, comprising an orbiter, lander, and rover.

Nuclear Technology

India has made significant strides in nuclear technology, developing capabilities for both civilian and military purposes. The Pokhran-II nuclear tests in 1998 demonstrated India’s nuclear capabilities to the world. The Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) have played pivotal roles in advancing nuclear science within the country.

Information Technology

India has established itself as a global IT hub, with companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, and Wipro leading the industry. These companies have contributed to Silicon Valley and the global tech industry, while Indian engineers and entrepreneurs have made substantial contributions in the field of information technology.

Pharmaceutical and Healthcare

India is a major player in the pharmaceutical industry, producing a significant portion of the world’s generic drugs. Indian pharmaceutical companies have played a crucial role in the global fight against diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. This contribution to healthcare has had a global impact.

Renewable Energy

India has made significant progress in the field of renewable energy, setting ambitious goals for solar and wind energy generation. The International Solar Alliance (ISA), initiated by India, promotes cooperation among countries in harnessing solar energy, contributing to sustainable development.

Biotechnology

In the field of biotechnology, India has made advancements through research institutions and companies. These advancements encompass genetic engineering, vaccine development, and crop improvement, making significant contributions to the global biotech sector.

Supercomputing

India’s indigenous supercomputer, Param, has been a valuable tool for scientific research and weather forecasting. It showcases India’s capabilities in high-performance computing.

Agriculture and Green Revolution

The Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, led by scientists like Norman Borlaug, transformed agricultural practices in India. It significantly increased food production and played a crucial role in improving food security.

Space Research and Navigation

India’s space research extends to navigation with the launch of its regional satellite navigation system called NavIC. NavIC provides accurate positioning information services to users in India and neighboring regions, enhancing navigation capabilities.

Science and Innovation

Indian scientists and researchers have made substantial contributions to various scientific fields, including physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics. Their work has elevated India’s standing in the global scientific community and contributed to scientific knowledge worldwide.

Concerns in Science and Technology in India

India’s science and technology landscape faces several concerns that impact its growth and competitiveness:

• Funding Challenges: The level of investment in research and development in India is often insufficient to support cutting-edge scientific endeavors and technological innovations. Inadequate funding hampers the country’s ability to tackle critical challenges and compete globally.
• Educational Variability: Disparities in the quality of science and technology education across the country hinder the development of a skilled workforce. Education reform is needed to make curriculum more relevant and equip students with practical skills.
• Brain Drain: The emigration of highly skilled researchers and scientists to foreign countries in pursuit of better opportunities results in a substantial loss of expertise and innovation within India.
• Innovation Ecosystem: Establishing a thriving innovation ecosystem with support for startups and entrepreneurship remains a challenge. Translating research into commercially viable products or services can be difficult.
• Infrastructure Gaps: Inadequate infrastructure, including state-of-the-art research facilities, hinders scientific progress and innovation.

Way Forward

To bolster India’s science and technology sector, key measures are vital. Firstly, an increase in research and development funding is imperative, with a greater budget allocation to support innovative projects and cutting-edge scientific endeavors. Concurrently, a focus on education reform is essential, enhancing the quality of science and technology education with modernized curricula and practical skill development.

Mitigating the brain drain necessitates incentives to retain talented researchers and scientists while nurturing an innovation ecosystem through support for startups and streamlined regulations promotes the commercialization of research. Infrastructure development, including state-of-the-art research facilities, will facilitate scientific progress. These measures collectively position India to contribute significantly to global scientific advancements and ensure socio-economic development.

Science and Technology in India UPSC

Science and Technology is a significant subject within the Civil Services Examination. It’s evident from the numerous questions related to this subject that appear in both the UPSC Prelims and Mains. To assist IAS aspirants in their exam preparations, this article offers downloadable PDFs of UPSC notes on Science and Technology. In the UPSC Mains, Science and Technology form part of the GS III syllabus. Additionally, science subjects such as Botany, Chemistry, and Biology are among the optional subject choices for the IAS Mains exam. These scientific subjects offer the potential for high scores, but often, aspirants face challenges in balancing static and dynamic aspects while making notes, especially when dealing with contemporary issues from the news.

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Science and Technology in India FAQs

What is the role of science and technology in modern india.

Science and technology in modern India drive economic growth, healthcare advancements, and agricultural transformation while fostering innovation, global contributions, and socio-economic development.

What is the future of science and technology in India?

India aspires for advancements in experimental physics, astrophysics, drug development, diagnostics, and biotechnology, aiming to push scientific frontiers.

How does science and technology contribute to economic growth in India?

Science and technology underpin various industries, such as information technology, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology, contributing to GDP and job creation.

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Science Essay

Essay About Science And Technology

Essay About Science and Technology| Tips & Examples

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Are you struggling to write your essay about science and technology? You're not alone.

This can be a difficult subject to write about, as it requires understanding technical details and developments.

However, with the right guidance, you can produce a high-quality essay yourself!

In this blog post, we will provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to write an essay about science and technology. We will also provide you with some helpful tips and examples to get you started.

So let’s get into it!

• 1. What is a Science and Technology Essay?
• 2. Science and Technology Essay Examples
• 3. How To Write a Science and Technology Essay?
• 4. Science and Technology Essay Topics
• 5. Science and Technology Essay Writing Tips

What is a Science and Technology Essay?

Before you learn about writing an essay about science and technology, you should understand what these terms mean.

Here are simple definitions of science and technology:

Science is a systematic study that helps us understand the natural world. Meanwhile, technology is the practical application of science that helps make our life easy.

Moreover, science and technology play an important role in people’s lives and human development. That is why you have to write an essay about it.

So, what is a science and technology essay?

It is a science essay that explores scientific and technological advancements and their effects on various aspects of life. 

It can cover topics such as advancements in medicine, communication, IT, transportation, and more.

A science and technology essay aims to inform readers about the developments in technology and to discuss its implications.

Read on to learn how to produce a great science and technology essay step-by-step.

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Science and Technology Essay Examples

Reading sample essays is a good way to get ideas and improve your writing skills.

Here are a few science and technology essay examples that you can use for inspiration.

Essay on Science and Technology for High School Students

Essay on Science and Technology for College Students

Essay on Science and Technology for University Students

Essay About Science and Technology Innovation - Example PDF

Essay About Science and Technology for Sustainable Future

Argumentative Example Essay About Science And Technology

Example Essay About Science And Technology

Essay on Science and Technology in 1000 words

Short Essay on Science and Technology

A short essay, typically consisting of around 300 words, offers a concise yet insightful exploration of a specific topic.

Let’s take a look at one: 

How To Write a Science and Technology Essay?

Writing a science and technology essay can be challenging, but it doesn't have to be.

Here are the steps you need to take to write a successful essay:

Choose a Topic

The first step is to choose a relevant and interesting topic for your essay. Any topic or idea that catches your interest is good to go.

You should also make sure that enough information is available on the topic. Moreover, you should be confident that you can present the information efficiently within the scope of your essay. 

Continue reading the blog to find a list of essay topics you can choose!

Do Your Research

After you've chosen a topic, it's time to do your research.

Science and technology are constantly growing, with new developments every day. So, read up on the latest developments in your chosen field.

This will help you provide an up-to-date and accurate analysis of your essay. It will also help you make your essay more credible and effective.

Write a Thesis Statement

You should be able to create a thesis statement after you’ve done your research.

A thesis statement defines your main argument and usually comes at the end of the introduction paragraph.  

But you have to think of your main argument before you set out to write the essay because it sets the direction of your essay. So make sure it is as clear and specific as possible.

Outline Your Essay

Once you have a clear thesis statement, it's time to make an outline of your essay .

An essay outline should include the main points you want to discuss and the sub-points under each of these main topics.

This will help you organize your thoughts and structure your argument in a logical way. 

Making an outline is the final step in the pre-writing preparation stage. Once you’ve done that, it's time to start writing your first draft.

Write the Introduction

The introduction is the first part of your essay. It should catch the readers' interest and lead them to your main argument.

You should start with an attention-grabbing statement or a quote related to your topic. Then, you can provide some context and explain why the topic is important. Finally, end the introduction with your thesis statement.

For a five-paragraph essay, your introduction should be about 150 words to 200 words at maximum.

Write the Main Body

After the introduction, move on to the body paragraphs.

Follow the outline you made and write the body paragraphs. Each paragraph should be focused on a single point determined in the topic sentence. 

Make sure to include evidence from reliable sources to support your arguments. 

In addition, make sure to connect your paragraphs by adding transitions between them and showing how they relate to the main thesis.

Write The Conclusion

Finally, write a strong conclusion that summarizes your main points and argument. Your conclusion should leave readers with a clear understanding of the topic. 

Moreover, it should also reinforce your thesis statement. Your conclusion should leave your readers with a sense of closure.

Want to learn more about how to write a conclusion? Here is a detailed blog that shows how you can write the best essay conclusion .

Edit Your Draft

The last step before submitting your essay is to edit and proofread it carefully.

Check for any spelling or grammar mistakes and inconsistencies in facts or arguments. Also, make sure all the references are correctly cited. You can hire our professional science essay writer to edit your draft if you don’t have enough time.

Let's read some good science and technology essays to see these steps in action!

Science and Technology Essay Topics

Now that you have an idea of how to write a science and technology essay, here are some topics you can use to get started:

• The Role of Nuclear Energy in the Modern World: Advantages, Challenges, and Future Prospects.
• How Space Technology is Revolutionizing our Day-to-Day Lives.
• Science and Technology in Developing Countries: Bridging the Gap for Improved Quality of Life.
• The Synergy of Science and Technology: Enhancing the Quality of Life in the Modern World.
• Nuclear Energy: A Sustainable Power Source for the Future?
• From Lab to Life: Practical Applications of Science for Daily Living.
• Space Technology Advancements: Impact on Daily Life and the Future.
• Science and Technology: Catalysts for Improving the Quality of Life Globally.
• Nuclear Energy and Sustainable Development in Developing Nations.
• The Partnership of Science and Technology: Transforming the Modern World for the Better.

If you need more general topics about science, visit our blog about science essay topics . You can find 150+ interesting science topics and get tips on how to choose a topic for your essay.

Science and Technology Essay Writing Tips

When writing your essay, here are some tips to keep in mind:

• Provide specific examples

You should provide appropriate evidence and examples to support your points whenever possible. This will make your argument more compelling.

• Stay on topic

Don’t veer off-topic, as this will weaken your argument. Make sure that every point and sub-point you make is connected to your main thesis.

• Avoid jargon

While technical terms may be useful in some cases, you should avoid using too much jargon, as this can make your essay difficult to follow.

• Be critical

Don’t be afraid to challenge existing assumptions or theories in your essay. Your essay will be more impactful if it goes out of the box.

• Use reliable sources

Make sure to include evidence from reliable sources such as academic journals, government reports, and recognized experts in the field.

Before submitting your essay, proofread it for any mistakes or typos. This will ensure that your essay is polished and professional.

Here is what you can do for effective proofreading:

• Read through your essay several times.
• Have someone else proofread your essay for you. They may be able to catch mistakes that you missed.
• Use grammar and spelling checker software to check for spelling mistakes.

If you're feeling intimated by the thought of writing an essay on science and technology, don't worry! You can do a good job with the right steps!

By following the steps and using the examples and writing tips provided above, you will be well on your way to creating a powerful essay.

However, if you are unable to write your essay, our science essay writing service can help you out!

Our expert writing service has a team of experienced writers who are experts in the fields of science and technology. Just ask us to write my essay for me and we will create a compelling essay that will impress your professor!

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Essay on Science And Technology A Boon Or Bane

Students are often asked to write an essay on Science And Technology A Boon Or Bane in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Science And Technology A Boon Or Bane

A double-edged sword.

Science and technology have revolutionized our lives in countless ways, but like any powerful tool, they can be used for good or for ill.

Benefits of Science and Technology

Drawbacks of science and technology.

However, science and technology can also have negative consequences. New technologies can displace jobs, and scientific discoveries can be used to create dangerous weapons. Additionally, our reliance on technology can lead to problems like social isolation and addiction.

Finding a Balance

The key to harnessing the power of science and technology for good is to find a balance. We need to use these tools responsibly and ethically so that they benefit humanity, not harm it.

250 Words Essay on Science And Technology A Boon Or Bane

Science and technology: a boon or bane.

Science and technology have advanced at an unprecedented rate in recent decades, bringing about significant changes in our lives. These advancements have impacted various aspects of society, both positively and negatively.

Science and technology have revolutionized the way we live. They have provided us with numerous conveniences and made our lives easier. From modern medicine to communication devices, from the internet to space exploration, science and technology have transformed our world.

While science and technology have brought about numerous benefits, they have also led to several drawbacks. Environmental issues, such as climate change and pollution, have been exacerbated by technological advancements. Additionally, some argue that technology has led to increased isolation and decreased human interaction.

Ethics and Responsibility

As science and technology continue to advance, it is essential to consider the ethical implications and potential consequences. It is crucial to use these advancements responsibly and ensure that they are directed towards the betterment of society.

Science and technology have been both a boon and a bane to society. While they have brought about tremendous benefits, it is imperative to address the potential drawbacks and use these advancements responsibly. Striking a balance between the advantages and disadvantages of science and technology is vital to ensure a sustainable and harmonious future.

500 Words Essay on Science And Technology A Boon Or Bane

Science and technology – a double-edged sword, boon: improved quality of life.

One of the most significant blessings of science and technology is the enhanced quality of life it offers. Medical advancements, such as vaccines and antibiotics, have eradicated deadly diseases, extending lifespans and improving overall health. Likewise, technological innovations like smartphones and computers have transformed communication, access to information, and entertainment, making our lives more convenient and connected.

Boon: Environmental Progress

Science and technology have also played a crucial role in environmental protection. Renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, are gaining traction as cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels, reducing carbon emissions and combating climate change. Furthermore, technological developments in waste management and recycling are helping to reduce pollution and preserve natural resources.

Bane: Technological Addiction

While technology offers numerous benefits, its overuse can lead to addiction and negative consequences. Excessive use of social media, video games, or the internet can isolate individuals, leading to loneliness, anxiety, and depression. Additionally, the constant bombardment of information and notifications can be overwhelming and distracting, affecting concentration and productivity.

Bane: Environmental Impact

Bane: job displacement.

Technological advancements have led to automation and increased efficiency, which can result in job displacement. As machines and algorithms become more sophisticated, they can perform tasks previously done by humans, leading to job losses and economic hardship for affected individuals. This can have far-reaching implications for communities and the economy as a whole.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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Essay on Science and Technology | Science and Technology Essay for Students and Children in English

February 14, 2024 by Prasanna

Essay on Science and Technology: Science encompasses the methodical study of the physical and natural properties of our surrounding through the medium of research and experiment. Technology is the application of science to achieve a realistic goal. The combination of science and technology enables us to live a comfortable life.

Science and technology are the essences of our everyday life. They give a futuristic vision to our thoughts and actions.  Science and technology contribute to promoting various aspects of our lives. Without science and technology, we would still be living in the Stone Age.  The existence of the modern era is the consequence of science and technology.

You can read more  Essay Writing about articles, events, people, sports, technology many more. Like, Science And Technology Essay.

Long and Short Essay on Science and Technology in English for Children and Kids

You will find two types of essays to suit the needs of children of different age groups. The long Essay on Science and Technology consists of 400 to 500 words. On the other hand, the Short Essay on Science and Technology is of 150 to 200 words.

Long Essay on Science and Technology 500 Words

The Essay on Science and Technology is in English for students and children from classes 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. However, students appearing in competitive exams or any such examination will also find it useful.

Science and technology are two different terms, but they cannot survive without each other. Science is a systematic study of the functioning of the physical and natural environment that surrounds us. On the other hand, technology is the application of science to bring about innovative changes. The intervention of science and technology has revolutionized not only the way we think, but it has also remodeled our lives. Whether we wake up at the sound of our morning alarm or go to bed after switching off the lights, it is influencing every aspect of our lives. The intention to lead a comfortable life is compelling us to walk on the path of progress, which is not possible without the help of science and technology. We have to give credit to science and technology to make our lives comfortable and relaxed.

On the other hand, we cannot deny the harmful aspect of destruction and war as a result of science and technology. Thus, science and technology play a pivotal role in progress as well as war. However, when we weigh their pros and cons, we find that the benefits of science and technology are immeasurable.

Science and technology are indispensable in constructing a thriving economy of the nation. Economic growth climbs the technological ladder by increasing the gross domestic product.  They support the establishment of high-tech industrial development, increases productivity, accumulates capital, and aids in healthy international competition. Science and technology have a tangible influence on the agricultural sector. It is needless to say that their involvement is increasing crop production by multifold.   Furthermore, science and technology is also helping farmers to adopt new techniques and machines to reduce their manual labor.

Not to mention, the contribution of science and technology in the world of medicine, which is helping to develop a healthy nation. The invention of medical equipment and researches in the field is providing the cure for the deadliest diseases. Thus, we find a substantial decrease in the death rate.

Science and technology are bringing the world closer day by day. We find visible development in the department of transport and telecommunication. The introduction of the internet and metro network has overcome the barrier of physical distance. They have given a virtual makeover to every sphere of our lives.

A nation progresses when the rate of literacy is high. Science and technology have made a mark in the field of education. Its continuous presence in schools and colleges is boosting the quality of teaching and learning. Introduction of audio-visual aid, online lessons, etc. are some of the examples of science and technology in education.

The penetration of science and technology is so deep-rooted that it is difficult to imagine our day to day life without them. Thus, we can conclude that science and technology are an inevitable part of our lives.

Short Essay on Science and Technology 200 Words

The brief essay on science and technology is in English for kids from classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Nevertheless, children can utilize the piece to prepare for periodic tests, speeches, and debates.

Science and technology are an essential component of our everyday lives. The modern civilization is a contribution of science and technology.

Their presence is the reason for our improved lifestyle. The development that we see around us is a result of science and technology. Science and technology allow us to lead a comfortable life. The replacement of the bullock cart by a car is proof of science and technology. They are prevalent in every aspect of our lives.  Whether it is baking a cake or a launch of a satellite, we find science and technology. With the help of science and technology, we can search for life on other planets. They alert us by predicting the weather forecast.  Many lives can be saved when the metrological department warns us about the tornado, cyclone, hurricane, tsunami, etc.    Thus, we cannot deny the importance of science and technology.

Science and technology are not static. Every day there is a discovery. Science and technology is a significant factor in improving various sectors, such as agriculture, industry, transport, communication, education, health, construction, etc. We avail of the benefits that science and technology provide us. The knowledge of science and technology are helping us in the betterment of our lives.

Read More: Science In Everyday Life Essay

10 Lines on Science and Technology Essay in English

• Science means knowledge.
• Galileo Galilee is synonymous of Science.
• Technology means the application of science.
• The first scientific tool was spears and needles.
• Advancement in every sphere of our lives is the effect of science and technology.
• Without science and technology, we would still be living in the Stone Age.
• We avail several benefits provided to us by science and technology.
• It has provided us with a comfortable lifestyle.
• At the same time, it makes our lives very mechanical.
• Despite some disadvantages of science and technology, the human race is highly dependent on them for survival.

Conclusion on Science and Technology Essay

• Essay writing helps to improve student’s vocabulary.
• Students can develop the ability to frame sentences correctly.
• They can be well-prepared for competitive examinations and other entrance examinations.
• Students who are aspiring for government jobs can also benefit from essay writing.
• Children can hone their writing skills.
• Essay writing helps improve the ability to express.
• Moreover, it is beneficial in refining the English language.
• The Practice of essay writing prepares students for debates, speeches, and public speaking.
• Regular practice of writing essays can inculcate creativity in children.
• It improves cognitive skills in children.

FAQs on Essay Science and Technology

Question 1. How have science and technology helped us in the field of agriculture?

Answer: Science and technology introduced improved techniques and instruments to increase the production of crops.

Question 2. How have science and technology helped in saving lives?

Answer: Science and technology enable us to find a cure for deadly diseases. Furthermore, the weather forecast of a hurricane, tornado, tsunami, etc. helps to evacuate people in that region.

Question 3. Are science and technology helpful in creating a comfortable life?

Answer: Yes, the invention of the fan, heaters, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, cars, etc. are the result of science and technology. They help create a comfortable life for us.

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Advancement of Science and Technology Essay

An essay is a piece of writing that revolves around a particular theme and contains the academic opinions of the person writing it. A basic essay mainly consists of three parts: Introduction, Body, and Conclusion.

Advancement of Science and Technology affects the future social and economic growth of a country. The ability to utilize modern science and technology is essential in shaping a country’s destiny, and it can enhance its development programs.

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Advancement of Science and Technology Essay (400+ Words)

Science and technology have become crucial for a nation’s wealth and power. Advancement of science and technology affects the future social and economic growth of a country.

The ability to utilize modern science and technology is essential in shaping a country’s destiny, and it can enhance its development programs.

Technological progress has decreased reliance on natural resources and boosted human efficiency by using machines. Quick technological advancements worldwide have resulted in better work output.

The most important aspect of the world today is using science to improve the human condition. Scientific discoveries should be turned into technological innovation and developed to make significant improvements in human life.

Through their proactive commitment, our agricultural scientists have developed new innovations for crop growth using scientific methods. These innovations have led to our national economy and human welfare flourishing by making us self-sufficient in food grains. Related technology and scientific methods, such as machines, quality seeds, fertilizers, and insecticides, have been instrumental in bringing about a green revolution in agriculture.

Our desired scientific and technological advancements have successfully boosted various critical national activities, including information and telecommunication, television, meteorological services, medical advancements, industrial development, nuclear research, Space Research, and Oceanographic Research, among others.

A robust science and technology infrastructure base has been established over the years to modernize world industries. It encompasses a chain of laboratories, specialized centers, various academic and research institutes, training centers, and useful development programs that continuously provide skilled, technically trained manpower and technological support to industries for better execution.

The field of medical care has made significant advancements due to the progress of science. The introduction of new technology has enabled the establishment of an affordable and effective medical care system. With the help of this technology, critical cases can now be handled with confidence, thus saving countless human lives.

Extensive medical research has been conducted in various areas such as nutrition, tuberculosis, reproduction, child care, leprosy, drugs, communicable diseases, cholera, and malaria, resulting in significant advancements. Thanks to these breakthroughs, mankind now possesses established methods of treatment and care to combat these deadly diseases.

As the modern world continues to progress rapidly, significant scientific and technological changes are occurring at a steady pace. In order to achieve its objective of becoming a world power and competing globally, our country must prioritize Science and Technology as its foremost national priority and strive to accomplish more in this field.

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• IELTS Writing Task 2
• IELTS Writing Task 1

Essay#14 | Advances in Science and Technology

Linking expressions.

In  Task 2 of the Academic Writing exam , you need to support the opinion you express by providing examples. You can use these phrases:

to introduce an example

• for example
• for instance
• for one thing
• another example of this is

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Write about the following topic:

Advances in science and technology and other areas of society in the last 100 years have transformed the way we live as well as postponing the day we die. There is no better lime to be alive than now.

To what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Write at least 250 words.

Model answer.

The last hundred years have seen rapid and dramatic developments in many areas, including medicine, transport, manufacturing and communications. Over that period our lives have changed in ways that our parents and grandparents could only have dreamed of, but the question we should ask is whether the world is a better place to live in as a result.

There have clearly been many benefits. Advances in medical science have brought cures for once fatal diseases and this has significantly extended the lifespan we can expect. Information technology has allowed us to contact friends or colleagues worldwide at the click of a mouse. We can now gather information, manage our bank account or shop without having to step outside our home. In addition, labour-saving devices such as washing machines and microwave ovens have made everyday tasks much easier.

However, the fact that life has improved in so many ways doesn’t mean that all the developments have been positive. For example, the emphasis on acquiring the latest technology has made people increasingly materialistic. We also tend to lead more isolated lives than our parents did, with less concern for other people. The resulting breakdown of traditional social ties can leave the elderly and other vulnerable people without the support they need. Among other serious problems we face are the drug culture, and the ever-present threat of terrorism.

To sum up, we have made great progress over the last hundred years but there are still many important issues to tackle. This may well be a better time to live than any previous age but hopefully, the future will be better still.

(268 words)

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Impact of Science and Technology Essay (Critical Writing)

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Can you reach New York from London in six hours without boarding a flight? Will you feel warm inside your house during winters, if you don’t have a heating system? If you don’t have a telephone and you have to stay at your office till late at night, will you be able to inform your wife? Can you imagine living without a television, a refrigerator, a washing machine, or a vacuum cleaner? If the answer to all such questions is in the negative (and for sure it will be negative) then undoubtedly science and technology have made a great impact on our lives and surroundings.

The relation between technologies and civilizations is very critical. The family structure has been globally affected by the advent of new technological devices. Certain technological advancements are society-specific because after all science and technology are governed by social principles and ethics.

Our family structure has changed drastically through the years. Earlier, families used to be consolidated. Members of a family lived together and worked as a team to provide for their children’s food, education, and other requirements. In other words, they were united. But due to large-scale industrialization (a result of modern-day science and technology), families have been forced to split. Dr. Mamdouh Awny argued, “The new technological products such as Radios and Televisions have made deep changes in the culture of the families. They have, to a certain extent, untied the family relations, who used to spend together the leisure times…” (Awny, 4)

Technology has usurped several activities from families. Now everyone is worried about his or her interest. A feeling of competition has crept into their minds. People don’t have time even for their beloved ones. E.F.Schumacher, a British economist, was also of the same opinion when he said, “I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs” (Swenson, 87).

Society has split into two major segments as a result of industrialization. The business segment and the working segment. People of these two segments are always at loggerheads due to conflicts in their interests. Moreover, a new segment called the middle class has spawned during these years.

The defeat of marriage as an institution has been the greatest disaster. Earlier, marriage was considered to be a sacred and everlasting relation. But nowadays marriage is considered to be a contract. The recent developments in science and technology have opened new avenues for people. Women are now more liberated. This has elevated stress among families.

Another drawback is unemployment. Advancement in technology means deploying machines in place of humans. This has resulted in unemployment and resentment among the societies.

We should not undermine the positive impacts of science and technology as well. We all work and live for a better future for our children. We try and send them to the best possible schools so that they may get the best of education. Modern technology has developed various means by which students can be imparted to the best of their knowledge. For instance, nowadays schools and colleges have computers in classrooms. Other fields where the impact of science and technology on society is visible, are urbanization (expansion of cities to give better life), modernization (for safety, comfort, and swiftness), and development in the means of transport (for comfort and swiftness).

To conclude, we can say that though science and technology have brought development, comfort, safety, swiftness, and knowledge, they have also been the reason for the plunging of moral values.

Awny, M. M. (2004). Social Impact of Technology: a perspective of Developing Countries. 13 th International Conference on Management of Technology- IAMOT 2004. 1-7 .

Swenson R. A. A Minute of Margin: Restoring Balance to Busy Lives. Colorado: NavPress, 2003. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2022, January 11). Impact of Science and Technology. https://ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-science-and-technology/

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• 28 May 2024
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The AI revolution is coming to robots: how will it change them?

• Elizabeth Gibney

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Humanoid robots developed by the US company Figure use OpenAI programming for language and vision. Credit: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong/Alamy

You have full access to this article via your institution.

For a generation of scientists raised watching Star Wars, there’s a disappointing lack of C-3PO-like droids wandering around our cities and homes. Where are the humanoid robots fuelled with common sense that can help around the house and workplace?

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might be set to fill that hole. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we are the last generation for which those sci-fi scenes are not a reality,” says Alexander Khazatsky, a machine-learning and robotics researcher at Stanford University in California.

From OpenAI to Google DeepMind, almost every big technology firm with AI expertise is now working on bringing the versatile learning algorithms that power chatbots, known as foundation models, to robotics. The idea is to imbue robots with common-sense knowledge, letting them tackle a wide range of tasks. Many researchers think that robots could become really good, really fast. “We believe we are at the point of a step change in robotics,” says Gerard Andrews, a marketing manager focused on robotics at technology company Nvidia in Santa Clara, California, which in March launched a general-purpose AI model designed for humanoid robots.

At the same time, robots could help to improve AI. Many researchers hope that bringing an embodied experience to AI training could take them closer to the dream of ‘artificial general intelligence’ — AI that has human-like cognitive abilities across any task . “The last step to true intelligence has to be physical intelligence,” says Akshara Rai, an AI researcher at Meta in Menlo Park, California.

But although many researchers are excited about the latest injection of AI into robotics, they also caution that some of the more impressive demonstrations are just that — demonstrations, often by companies that are eager to generate buzz. It can be a long road from demonstration to deployment, says Rodney Brooks, a roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, whose company iRobot invented the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner.

There are plenty of hurdles on this road, including scraping together enough of the right data for robots to learn from, dealing with temperamental hardware and tackling concerns about safety. Foundation models for robotics “should be explored”, says Harold Soh, a specialist in human–robot interactions at the National University of Singapore. But he is sceptical, he says, that this strategy will lead to the revolution in robotics that some researchers predict.

Firm foundations

The term robot covers a wide range of automated devices, from the robotic arms widely used in manufacturing, to self-driving cars and drones used in warfare and rescue missions. Most incorporate some sort of AI — to recognize objects, for example. But they are also programmed to carry out specific tasks, work in particular environments or rely on some level of human supervision, says Joyce Sidopoulos, co-founder of MassRobotics, an innovation hub for robotics companies in Boston, Massachusetts. Even Atlas — a robot made by Boston Dynamics, a robotics company in Waltham, Massachusetts, which famously showed off its parkour skills in 2018 — works by carefully mapping its environment and choosing the best actions to execute from a library of built-in templates.

For most AI researchers branching into robotics, the goal is to create something much more autonomous and adaptable across a wider range of circumstances. This might start with robot arms that can ‘pick and place’ any factory product, but evolve into humanoid robots that provide company and support for older people , for example. “There are so many applications,” says Sidopoulos.

The human form is complicated and not always optimized for specific physical tasks, but it has the huge benefit of being perfectly suited to the world that people have built. A human-shaped robot would be able to physically interact with the world in much the same way that a person does.

However, controlling any robot — let alone a human-shaped one — is incredibly hard. Apparently simple tasks, such as opening a door, are actually hugely complex, requiring a robot to understand how different door mechanisms work, how much force to apply to a handle and how to maintain balance while doing so. The real world is extremely varied and constantly changing.

The approach now gathering steam is to control a robot using the same type of AI foundation models that power image generators and chatbots such as ChatGPT. These models use brain-inspired neural networks to learn from huge swathes of generic data. They build associations between elements of their training data and, when asked for an output, tap these connections to generate appropriate words or images, often with uncannily good results.

Likewise, a robot foundation model is trained on text and images from the Internet, providing it with information about the nature of various objects and their contexts. It also learns from examples of robotic operations. It can be trained, for example, on videos of robot trial and error, or videos of robots that are being remotely operated by humans, alongside the instructions that pair with those actions. A trained robot foundation model can then observe a scenario and use its learnt associations to predict what action will lead to the best outcome.

Google DeepMind has built one of the most advanced robotic foundation models, known as Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2), that can operate a mobile robot arm built by its sister company Everyday Robots in Mountain View, California. Like other robotic foundation models, it was trained on both the Internet and videos of robotic operation. Thanks to the online training, RT-2 can follow instructions even when those commands go beyond what the robot has seen another robot do before 1 . For example, it can move a drink can onto a picture of Taylor Swift when asked to do so — even though Swift’s image was not in any of the 130,000 demonstrations that RT-2 had been trained on.

In other words, knowledge gleaned from Internet trawling (such as what the singer Taylor Swift looks like) is being carried over into the robot’s actions. “A lot of Internet concepts just transfer,” says Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, an AI and robotics researcher at Google DeepMind in San Francisco, California. This radically reduces the amount of physical data that a robot needs to have absorbed to cope in different situations, she says.

But to fully understand the basics of movements and their consequences, robots still need to learn from lots of physical data. And therein lies a problem.

Data dearth

Although chatbots are being trained on billions of words from the Internet, there is no equivalently large data set for robotic activity. This lack of data has left robotics “in the dust”, says Khazatsky.

Pooling data is one way around this. Khazatsky and his colleagues have created DROID 2 , an open-source data set that brings together around 350 hours of video data from one type of robot arm (the Franka Panda 7DoF robot arm, built by Franka Robotics in Munich, Germany), as it was being remotely operated by people in 18 laboratories around the world. The robot-eye-view camera has recorded visual data in hundreds of environments, including bathrooms, laundry rooms, bedrooms and kitchens. This diversity helps robots to perform well on tasks with previously unencountered elements, says Khazatsky.

When prompted to ‘pick up extinct animal’, Google’s RT-2 model selects the dinosaur figurine from a crowded table. Credit: Google DeepMind

Gopalakrishnan is part of a collaboration of more than a dozen academic labs that is also bringing together robotic data, in its case from a diversity of robot forms, from single arms to quadrupeds. The collaborators’ theory is that learning about the physical world in one robot body should help an AI to operate another — in the same way that learning in English can help a language model to generate Chinese, because the underlying concepts about the world that the words describe are the same. This seems to work. The collaboration’s resulting foundation model, called RT-X, which was released in October 2023 3 , performed better on real-world tasks than did models the researchers trained on one robot architecture.

Many researchers say that having this kind of diversity is essential. “We believe that a true robotics foundation model should not be tied to only one embodiment,” says Peter Chen, an AI researcher and co-founder of Covariant, an AI firm in Emeryville, California.

Covariant is also working hard on scaling up robot data. The company, which was set up in part by former OpenAI researchers, began collecting data in 2018 from 30 variations of robot arms in warehouses across the world, which all run using Covariant software. Covariant’s Robotics Foundation Model 1 (RFM-1) goes beyond collecting video data to encompass sensor readings, such as how much weight was lifted or force applied. This kind of data should help a robot to perform tasks such as manipulating a squishy object, says Gopalakrishnan — in theory, helping a robot to know, for example, how not to bruise a banana.

Covariant has built up a proprietary database that includes hundreds of billions of ‘tokens’ — units of real-world robotic information — which Chen says is roughly on a par with the scale of data that trained GPT-3, the 2020 version of OpenAI's large language model. “We have way more real-world data than other people, because that’s what we have been focused on,” Chen says. RFM-1 is poised to roll out soon, says Chen, and should allow operators of robots running Covariant’s software to type or speak general instructions, such as “pick up apples from the bin”.

Another way to access large databases of movement is to focus on a humanoid robot form so that an AI can learn by watching videos of people — of which there are billions online. Nvidia’s Project GR00T foundation model, for example, is ingesting videos of people performing tasks, says Andrews. Although copying humans has huge potential for boosting robot skills, doing so well is hard, says Gopalakrishnan. For example, robot videos generally come with data about context and commands — the same isn’t true for human videos, she says.

Virtual reality

A final and promising way to find limitless supplies of physical data, researchers say, is through simulation. Many roboticists are working on building 3D virtual-reality environments, the physics of which mimic the real world, and then wiring those up to a robotic brain for training. Simulators can churn out huge quantities of data and allow humans and robots to interact virtually, without risk, in rare or dangerous situations, all without wearing out the mechanics. “If you had to get a farm of robotic hands and exercise them until they achieve [a high] level of dexterity, you will blow the motors,” says Nvidia’s Andrews.

But making a good simulator is a difficult task. “Simulators have good physics, but not perfect physics, and making diverse simulated environments is almost as hard as just collecting diverse data,” says Khazatsky.

Meta and Nvidia are both betting big on simulation to scale up robot data, and have built sophisticated simulated worlds: Habitat from Meta and Isaac Sim from Nvidia. In them, robots gain the equivalent of years of experience in a few hours, and, in trials, they then successfully apply what they have learnt to situations they have never encountered in the real world. “Simulation is an extremely powerful but underrated tool in robotics, and I am excited to see it gaining momentum,” says Rai.

Many researchers are optimistic that foundation models will help to create general-purpose robots that can replace human labour. In February, Figure, a robotics company in Sunnyvale, California, raised US$675 million in investment for its plan to use language and vision models developed by OpenAI in its general-purpose humanoid robot. A demonstration video shows a robot giving a person an apple in response to a general request for ‘something to eat’. The video on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) has racked up 4.8 million views.

Exactly how this robot’s foundation model has been trained, along with any details about its performance across various settings, is unclear (neither OpenAI nor Figure responded to Nature ’s requests for an interview). Such demos should be taken with a pinch of salt, says Soh. The environment in the video is conspicuously sparse, he says. Adding a more complex environment could potentially confuse the robot — in the same way that such environments have fooled self-driving cars. “Roboticists are very sceptical of robot videos for good reason, because we make them and we know that out of 100 shots, there’s usually only one that works,” Soh says.

Hurdles ahead

As the AI research community forges ahead with robotic brains, many of those who actually build robots caution that the hardware also presents a challenge: robots are complicated and break a lot. Hardware has been advancing, Chen says, but “a lot of people looking at the promise of foundation models just don't know the other side of how difficult it is to deploy these types of robots”, he says.

Another issue is how far robot foundation models can get using the visual data that make up the vast majority of their physical training. Robots might need reams of other kinds of sensory data, for example from the sense of touch or proprioception — a sense of where their body is in space — say Soh. Those data sets don’t yet exist. “There’s all this stuff that’s missing, which I think is required for things like a humanoid to work efficiently in the world,” he says.

Releasing foundation models into the real world comes with another major challenge — safety. In the two years since they started proliferating, large language models have been shown to come up with false and biased information. They can also be tricked into doing things that they are programmed not to do, such as telling users how to make a bomb. Giving AI systems a body brings these types of mistake and threat to the physical world. “If a robot is wrong, it can actually physically harm you or break things or cause damage,” says Gopalakrishnan.

Valuable work going on in AI safety will transfer to the world of robotics, says Gopalakrishnan. In addition, her team has imbued some robot AI models with rules that layer on top of their learning, such as not to even attempt tasks that involve interacting with people, animals or other living organisms. “Until we have confidence in robots, we will need a lot of human supervision,” she says.

Despite the risks, there is a lot of momentum in using AI to improve robots — and using robots to improve AI. Gopalakrishnan thinks that hooking up AI brains to physical robots will improve the foundation models, for example giving them better spatial reasoning. Meta, says Rai, is among those pursuing the hypothesis that “true intelligence can only emerge when an agent can interact with its world”. That real-world interaction, some say, is what could take AI beyond learning patterns and making predictions, to truly understanding and reasoning about the world.

What the future holds depends on who you ask. Brooks says that robots will continue to improve and find new applications, but their eventual use “is nowhere near as sexy” as humanoids replacing human labour. But others think that developing a functional and safe humanoid robot that is capable of cooking dinner, running errands and folding the laundry is possible — but could just cost hundreds of millions of dollars. “I’m sure someone will do it,” says Khazatsky. “It’ll just be a lot of money, and time.”

Nature 630 , 22-24 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01442-5

Updates & Corrections

Correction 31 May 2024 : An earlier version of this feature gave the wrong name for Nvidia’s simulated world.

Brohan, A. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.15818 (2023).

Khazatsky, A. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.12945 (2024).

Open X-Embodiment Collaboration et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.08864 (2023).

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2022’s seismic shift in US tech policy will change how we innovate

Three bills investing hundreds of billions into technological development could change the way we think about government’s role in growing prosperity.

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This essay is part of MIT Technology Review's 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2023. Explore the full list here .

It was the perfect political photo op. The occasion was the September groundbreaking for Intel’s massive $20 billion chip manufacturing complex in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. Backhoes dotted a construction site that stretched across hundreds of flat, empty acres. At a simple podium with the presidential seal, Joe Biden talked about putting an end to the term “Rust Belt,” a name popularized in the 1980s in reference to the Midwest’s rapidly declining manufacturing sector.

It was a presidential victory lap after the passage of some landmark US legislation, beginning with the infrastructure bill in late 2021. Together, three major bills promise hundreds of billions in federal investments to transform the nation’s technology landscape. While ending the Rust Belt might be typical political hyperbole, you get the point: the spending spree is meant to revive the country’s economy by rebuilding its industrial base. 

The dollar amounts are jaw-dropping. The bills include $550 billion in new spending over the next five years in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, $280 billion in the CHIPS and Science Act (which prompted Intel to go ahead on the Ohio construction), and another roughly $390 billion for clean energy in the Inflation Reduction Act. Among the investments is the most aggressive federal funding for science and technology in decades. But the greatest long-term impact of the legislative flurry could come from its bold embrace of something that has long been a political third rail in the US: industrial policy. 

That means deliberate government interventions, including financial incentives and investments, favoring growth in particular industries or technologies—say, for national security reasons or to address problems such as climate change. Think of US support for semiconductor manufacturing in the 1980s or the creation during the Cold War of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which led to the internet and GPS.  

But for decades now, free-market advocates have disparaged industrial policy as a foolhardy attempt to pick economic winners. Since the early 1980s and the era of Ronald Reagan, US politicians and many mainstream economists have disdained it. In reality, it never completely went away. President Obama toyed with elements of it in trying to revive manufacturing in the US after the 2008 recession; President Trump turned to it in his Operation Warp Speed to mobilize industry around covid vaccine development. But for the most part, it has seemed foreign to US political thinking: it was something China does, something Japan, South Korea, and France used to do (remember the Concorde?). 

The US has effective and productive free markets. And, of course, we have Silicon Valley, our own engine of economic growth, propelling the economy forward. All we need to do is unleash that engine by loosening regulations and cutting taxes. Or so the dominant narrative went. 

That narrative began crumbling long before the covid-19 pandemic made clear the need for the government to help bolster critical industrial sectors and supply chains. An unblinking faith in free markets has led to globalization, helping to gut many of the country’s industries, particularly in manufacturing. For a while, the economic argument was that it didn’t matter where you made stuff; cheap commodities were good for living standards, and the country should focus on high-tech growth. 

The problem is that high-tech growth has been limited, anemic, and unevenly distributed. Income inequality has climbed to high levels. The Rust Belt and other sections of the middle of the country keep getting rustier. Despite impressive advances in artificial intelligence and other areas of high tech, the nation’s prosperity has largely benefited people in only a few regions; notably, experts have begun identifying a handful of superstar cities, including San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston, that are booming while the rest of the country suffers. Perhaps most telling, growth of productivity—particularly the kind related to innovation, called total factor productivity—has been sluggish for several decades now in the US and many other rich countries. 

I wrote about the failure of technologies such as social media and artificial intelligence to boost productivity growth in the mid-2010s, in an essay titled “ Tech slowdown threatens the American Dream .” Since then, the situation hasn’t gotten any better, roiling US politics and fueling a mood of economic malaise. 

What’s changed now is that the new legislation, which passed with some degree of bipartisan support in Congress, signals a strong appetite across the political spectrum for the US government to reengage with the country’s industrial base. After decades of declining federal investment in R&D , which dropped from 1.2% of GDP in the late 1970s to below 0.8% in recent years, the CHIPS and Science Act alone authorizes some $174 billion for research at places like the National Science Foundation.

Part of the reason the legislation received such broad support is that the funding provisions are a bit of Rorschach test. Some see measures to defend critical national technology businesses like chip production against the threat from China, and to make sure we don’t lose the global race in areas such as AI and quantum computing. Others see green jobs and efforts to address climate change, and a return to the post–World War II recognition that investing in science and research is critical to economic well-being. 

Still, despite the differences in motivation, the federal government’s willingness to embrace hawkish industrial policy is at least providing a chance to rethink the role the state plays in innovation. “It’s not just an opportunity—it’s a necessity,” says Dan Breznitz, the Peter J. Munk professor of Innovation Studies at the University of Toronto and co-director of its Innovation Policy Lab. After decades, he says, it’s time the US government got back in the game of “understanding the importance of merging innovation strategy with industrial policy.” 

Likewise, the European Union, South Korea and Japan, countries in the Middle East, and various other members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are all “back on the industrial-policy bandwagon,” says Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard. “It’s not like industrial policy ever went away,” says Rodrik, “but now it’s at the center of the conversation.” Instead of being embarrassed by the topic, he says, politicians are now touting it as a strategy. 

For economists like Diane Coyle, an expert on productivity and the emerging digital economy, the need for industrial policy to promote targeted growth is obvious at a time when productivity is stagnant, climate change is reaching a crisis point, and the rapid digitalization of the economy is worsening inequality. “We absolutely do need industrial policy in the kind of economy we have now,” says Coyle, the co-director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. “But the catch, of course, is it’s difficult to do, and governments often don’t do it well.” 

What about Solyndra?

The well-worn critique that industrial policy asks governments to pick winners, something they aren’t particularly good at, doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. For every Solyndra (a solar company that received a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee before flaming out, and the favorite example of a disastrous losing pick), there is a Tesla—funded around the same time by a federal loan. But the criticism does have some truth to it; industrial policy requires, well, policies. It requires choices. 

The US legislation passed over the last year is really a series of different industrial and innovation strategies. There’s a classic industrial policy that singles out support to the chip industry; a green industrial policy in the Inflation Reduction Act (which is often called the climate bill) that broadly favors specific types of companies such as EV manufacturers; and other spending choices and policies scattered throughout the bills that aim to create new jobs. Arguably the most important provisions, at least according to some economists, are those designed to boost federal support for R&D.

There is no obvious, coherent vision tying it all together. 

For now, says David Victor, a professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California, San Diego, that’s fine. “It’s more like industrial policy à la carte,” he says. It’s based on what is politically possible, appeasing different interests, from labor to industry to climate activists. Now, says Victor, “we need to turn it into as effective industrial policy as possible.”

One challenge will be dealing with potentially conflicting priorities. For example, the climate bill’s generous tax incentives for electric vehicles come with a few stipulations. The EVs must be assembled in North America. What’s more, the battery components must be made or assembled in North America and the critical metals going into the batteries must be mined in the US or by its free-trade partners. That might boost long-term domestic manufacturing, creating jobs and building more reliable supply chains, but it also could create a bottleneck in EV production. If that happens, it could slow down efforts to reduce carbon emissions. 

Various other trade-offs and choices loom as the country ramps up its technology investments. To help make better choices, Erica Fuchs, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, and her collaborators have started a pilot project, funded by the NSF, that will use advanced data analysis and cross-disciplinary expertise from a team of university researchers to better inform policy makers on technology decisions.

Called the National Network for Critical Technology Assessment, it’s meant to provide useful information on different options to meet various geopolitical and economic objectives. For example, given US dependency on China for lithium and the Democratic Republic of the Congo for cobalt, and given the risks of those supply chains, what is the potential value of innovations in battery recycling, alternative battery chemistries (such as ones that don’t use cobalt), and alternative extraction technologies? Likewise, there are questions around what parts of domestic battery manufacturing are most important for creating US jobs. 

While much analysis has already gone into writing the legislation, says Fuchs, many more questions will come up as the government attempts to spend the allocated funds to best realize legislative goals. She hopes the project will eventually lead to a larger network of experts from academia, industry, and government that provide the tools to clarify and quantify opportunities emerging from US innovation policies. 

A new story

Any new narrative that the government can promote innovation and use it to foster economic prosperity is still very much a work in progress. It’s not yet clear how the various provisions in the different pieces of legislation will play out. Perhaps most worrisome, the large jumps in funding for R&D in the CHIPS and Science Act are simply authorizations—recommendations that Congress will need to work into the budget anew every year. A switch in political mood could quickly kill the funding.

But perhaps the greatest unknown is how the federal funding will affect local economies and the welfare of millions of Americans who have suffered decades of lost manufacturing and declining job opportunities. Economists have long argued that technological advances are what drive economic growth. But over the last few decades, the prosperity resulting from such advances has been largely restricted to a few high-tech industries and has mostly benefited a relatively small elite. Can the public once again be convinced that innovation can lead to widespread prosperity? 

One worry is that while the recent legislation strongly supports semiconductor manufacturing and assorted clean technologies, the bills do little to create good jobs where they are most needed, says Harvard’s Rodrik. “In terms of bang for the buck,” he says, investing in advanced manufacturing and semiconductors “is one of the least effective ways of creating good jobs.” There is, he says, a “kind of manufacturing nostalgia” and a belief that rebuilding this sector will bring the middle class back. But that’s illusory, he says, since today’s advanced manufacturing is highly automated, and facilities tend to employ relatively few workers. 

Rodrik proposes what he calls an industrial policy for good jobs that would move beyond manufacturing and target the service sector, where by far the most jobs are in the US. His plan calls for investing in new technologies and companies that would improve productivity in jobs long thought of as low-skilled. For example, he points to opportunities to increase the capabilities of people working in long-term care, an area that is exploding as the population ages, by giving them digital tools. 

We also need to drop the pretensions around Silicon Valley’s role in creating widespread prosperity. A little more than six years ago, I wrote an essay titled “ Dear Silicon Valley: Forget flying cars, give us economic growth. ” Even with the advent of AI and driverless cars, economists were fretting over slow productivity growth. The inability of those in Silicon Valley to develop and commercialize the types of technologies and innovations that produce growth across a broad swath of the economy was clear. 

The tech industry gave us Zoom to survive the pandemic, and Amazon went on a hiring spree, but none of this led to a widespread economic expansion. We’re still waiting for the long-anticipated economy-­wide productivity boom from AI. These days, I would tweak the message: Forget about Silicon Valley and look elsewhere for economic transformation. 

If not Silicon Valley and other centers of innovation, where will that transformation come from? Though federal legislation has kick-started the discussion about industrial policy and innovation strategies, any real change will have to happen through efforts by cities and states. Each city, says Breznitz of the University of Toronto, will need to figure things out for itself, creating innovation strategies that work for its people on the basis of its industrial base, educational resources, and type of workforce. And, he admonishes, cities need to stop pinning their hopes on an elusive high-tech strategy modeled on Silicon Valley. 

“Two hundred cities in the US are all trying to look like Silicon Valley,” Breznitz says, adding, “I don’t know why. Maybe they’ve never been to Silicon Valley?”

A key, he says, is recognizing that inventions are just one stage of innovation. Local governments need to support what he calls continuous innovation by helping local companies and industries offer improved and cheaper products and services. It might not be as glamorous as coming up with a novel idea for a radical new business, but it’s how most companies and regions become more productive and localities prosper. 

Creating a convincing narrative that large parts of the country buy into will take time. But that, says UCSD’s Victor, is precisely the point of industrial policy: “You begin to change the facts on the ground. You create new industries and jobs. And then the politics shift.”

Before that happens, of course, lots can go wrong. Successful industrial policy depends on consistent and disciplined choices by politicians. You can decide for yourself whether you think they will manage that. 

But one reason for renewed optimism is that today’s technologies, especially artificial intelligence, robotics, genomic medicine, and advanced computation, provide vast opportunities to improve our lives, especially in areas like education, health care, and other services. If the government, at the national and local level, can find ways to help turn that innovation into prosperity across the economy, then we will truly have begun to rewrite the prevailing political narrative.

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The Long-Overlooked Molecule That Will Define a Generation of Science

By Thomas Cech

Dr. Cech is a biochemist and the author of the forthcoming book “The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets,” from which this essay is adapted.

From E=mc² to splitting the atom to the invention of the transistor, the first half of the 20th century was dominated by breakthroughs in physics.

Then, in the early 1950s, biology began to nudge physics out of the scientific spotlight — and when I say “biology,” what I really mean is DNA. The momentous discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953 more or less ushered in a new era in science that culminated in the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, which decoded all of our DNA into a biological blueprint of humankind.

DNA has received an immense amount of attention. And while the double helix was certainly groundbreaking in its time, the current generation of scientific history will be defined by a different (and, until recently, lesser-known) molecule — one that I believe will play an even bigger role in furthering our understanding of human life: RNA.

You may remember learning about RNA (ribonucleic acid) back in your high school biology class as the messenger that carries information stored in DNA to instruct the formation of proteins. Such messenger RNA, mRNA for short, recently entered the mainstream conversation thanks to the role they played in the Covid-19 vaccines. But RNA is much more than a messenger, as critical as that function may be.

Other types of RNA, called “noncoding” RNAs, are a tiny biological powerhouse that can help to treat and cure deadly diseases, unlock the potential of the human genome and solve one of the most enduring mysteries of science: explaining the origins of all life on our planet.

Though it is a linchpin of every living thing on Earth, RNA was misunderstood and underappreciated for decades — often dismissed as nothing more than a biochemical backup singer, slaving away in obscurity in the shadows of the diva, DNA. I know that firsthand: I was slaving away in obscurity on its behalf.

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Science and History of GMOs and Other Food Modification Processes

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How has genetic engineering changed plant and animal breeding?

Did you know.

Genetic engineering is often used in combination with traditional breeding to produce the genetically engineered plant varieties on the market today.

For thousands of years, humans have been using traditional modification methods like selective breeding and cross-breeding to breed plants and animals with more desirable traits. For example, early farmers developed cross-breeding methods to grow corn with a range of colors, sizes, and uses. Today’s strawberries are a cross between a strawberry species native to North America and a strawberry species native to South America.

Most of the foods we eat today were created through traditional breeding methods. But changing plants and animals through traditional breeding can take a long time, and it is difficult to make very specific changes. After scientists developed genetic engineering in the 1970s, they were able to make similar changes in a more specific way and in a shorter amount of time.

A Timeline of Genetic Modification in Agriculture

A Timeline of Genetic Modification in Modern Agriculture

Circa 8000 BCE: Humans use traditional modification methods like selective breeding and cross-breeding to breed plants and animals with more desirable traits.

1866: Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, breeds two different types of peas and identifies the basic process of genetics.

1922: The first hybrid corn is produced and sold commercially.

1940: Plant breeders learn to use radiation or chemicals to randomly change an organism’s DNA.

1953: Building on the discoveries of chemist Rosalind Franklin, scientists James Watson and Francis Crick identify the structure of DNA.

1973: Biochemists Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen develop genetic engineering by inserting DNA from one bacteria into another.

1982: FDA approves the first consumer GMO product developed through genetic engineering: human insulin to treat diabetes.

1986: The federal government establishes the Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology. This policy describes how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) work together to regulate the safety of GMOs.

1992: FDA policy states that foods from GMO plants must meet the same requirements, including the same safety standards, as foods derived from traditionally bred plants.

1994: The first GMO produce created through genetic engineering—a GMO tomato—becomes available for sale after studies evaluated by federal agencies proved it to be as safe as traditionally bred tomatoes.

1990s: The first wave of GMO produce created through genetic engineering becomes available to consumers: summer squash, soybeans, cotton, corn, papayas, tomatoes, potatoes, and canola. Not all are still available for sale.

2003: The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations develop international guidelines and standards to determine the safety of GMO foods.

2005: GMO alfalfa and sugar beets are available for sale in the United States.

2015: FDA approves an application for the first genetic modification in an animal for use as food, a genetically engineered salmon.

2016: Congress passes a law requiring labeling for some foods produced through genetic engineering and uses the term “bioengineered,” which will start to appear on some foods.

2017: GMO apples are available for sale in the U.S.

2019: FDA completes consultation on first food from a genome edited plant.

2020 : GMO pink pineapple is available to U.S. consumers.

2020 : Application for GalSafe pig was approved.

How are GMOs made?

“GMO” (genetically modified organism) has become the common term consumers and popular media use to describe foods that have been created through genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is a process that involves:

• Identifying the genetic information—or “gene”—that gives an organism (plant, animal, or microorganism) a desired trait
• Copying that information from the organism that has the trait
• Inserting that information into the DNA of another organism
• Then growing the new organism

How Are GMOs Made? Fact Sheet

Making a GMO Plant, Step by Step

The following example gives a general idea of the steps it takes to create a GMO plant. This example uses a type of insect-resistant corn called “Bt corn.” Keep in mind that the processes for creating a GMO plant, animal, or microorganism may be different.

To produce a GMO plant, scientists first identify what trait they want that plant to have, such as resistance to drought, herbicides, or insects. Then, they find an organism (plant, animal, or microorganism) that already has that trait within its genes. In this example, scientists wanted to create insect-resistant corn to reduce the need to spray pesticides. They identified a gene in a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) , which produces a natural insecticide that has been in use for many years in traditional and organic agriculture.

After scientists find the gene with the desired trait, they copy that gene.

For Bt corn, they copied the gene in Bt that would provide the insect-resistance trait.

Next, scientists use tools to insert the gene into the DNA of the plant. By inserting the Bt gene into the DNA of the corn plant, scientists gave it the insect resistance trait.

This new trait does not change the other existing traits.

In the laboratory, scientists grow the new corn plant to ensure it has adopted the desired trait (insect resistance). If successful, scientists first grow and monitor the new corn plant (now called Bt corn because it contains a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis) in greenhouses and then in small field tests before moving it into larger field tests. GMO plants go through in-depth review and tests before they are ready to be sold to farmers.

The entire process of bringing a GMO plant to the marketplace takes several years.

Learn more about the process for creating genetically engineered microbes and genetically engineered animals .

What are the latest scientific advances in plant and animal breeding?

Scientists are developing new ways to create new varieties of crops and animals using a process called genome editing . These techniques can make changes more quickly and precisely than traditional breeding methods.

There are several genome editing tools, such as CRISPR . Scientists can use these newer genome editing tools to make crops more nutritious, drought tolerant, and resistant to insect pests and diseases.

Learn more about Genome Editing in Agricultural Biotechnology .

How GMOs Are Regulated in the United States

GMO Crops, Animal Food, and Beyond

How GMO Crops Impact Our World

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