Mildred S. Dresselhaus

Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit. The transistor wouldn't have gone very far by itself, as just a single device. The integrated circuit made the whole thing happen.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Nano is one, and the other is bio.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

What surprised me is how fast a lot of things have happened. The high-energy physics community has been using the Internet for 30 or 40 years, and I used to think of it as something for aficionados, not something for grandmothers. Everything has exploded in recent years.

"In the last 20 years, the industry has been focusing mostly on software. Hardware hasn't been that important. Now things are turning around, as they always do, and we need better hardware all of a sudden, because we're reaching the brick wall, where things don't scale anymore. So nanolevel electronics has become important."