At a recent X2 workshop on the future of chemistry and chemical industries, X2 researchers and executives and scientists constructed a map of the future of chemistry.

ZuiPrezi map from Innovation Day

The most interesting insight to emerge from the workshop involves green chemistry. The groups identified several major challenges that will drive research agendas and funding in chemistry in the 2010s: energy (in particular the fallout from declining oil supplies); resources (e.g., growing scarcity of natural resources, efforts to create renewable substitutes); health (in particular the challenges of aging populations); global problems like climate and population change; and regulation (especially around envrionmental protections and manufacturing processes). At the center of the map was green chemistry, which they argued had the capacity to contribute innovations across all these areas. If energy, resources, health and regulation present major challenges in the coming decade, green chemistry-- which includes efforts to develop environmentally low-impact (low-energy and low-water) manufacturing processes, renewable sources for synthetic products, cradle-to-cradle processes, etc.-- may represent the solution.

Another notable insight was the relative unimportance of nanotechnology, which workshop participants described as a subset of materials, or a set of tools rather than an autonomous field or research agenda.

It's a commonplace that the 21st century will be (or already is) the century of biology. Just as the 20th century was dominated by the physical sciences (think of the electronics revolution, nuclear power, the preeminence of physics in the popular imagination), the thinking goes, science in the 21st century will be driven by the life sciences. However, if these experts are right, then green chemistry could define a service role for itself that would rival genetic engineering, genomics and environmental science, and help establish its centrality in the applied sciences.