The Royal Society, which for over three centuries has been the prime meeting-place for all the leading pathfinders in British science and technology, is concerned more than ever today with the great enterprise of viewing technological and scientific development and research in the total context of the needs emerging in industry as a whole. To this end, the Society’s Committee on Industrial Activities, of which I am Chairman, but most of whose 22 members are Fellows of the Royal Society working within British industry, has instituted a series of major discussion meetings under the general heading ‘Technology in the 1980s’. One clear object of these meetings is to focus attention upon those developments and researches now in progress that relate to the needs of a particular industry and that seem so important that they are likely to transform some aspect of the technology of that industry by (say) the 1980s. An even more important aim is to look ahead, in the light of all the information we have about not only technological but also general developments in that industry, and to try to forecast its expected character and problems in the 1980
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in an integrated fashion, that can give real help in planning today’s research and development effort.