I’ve long suspected that physical scientists have occasional attacks of biology envy, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the US government announced last year the “Materials Genome Initiative for Global Competiveness”. Its aim is to “discover, develop, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials at least twice as fast as possible today, at a fraction of the cost.” There’s a genuine problem here – for people used to the rapid pace of innovation in information technology, the very slow rate at which new materials are taken up in new manufactured products is an affront. The solution proposed here is to use those very advances in information technology to boost the rate of materials innovation, just as (the rhetoric invites us to infer) the rate of progress in biology has been boosted by big data driven projects like the human genome project.
There’s no question that many big problems could be addressed by new materials. Continue reading “Do materials even have genomes?”