Quantum leaps in technology transfer.

More than a few of us at NIEHS were born around 1940 and recall that modern communication consisted of the telephone and the radio. Just take a trip through time, and look at the 1930 through 1990 editions of Popular Mechanics posted on the Internet (1). In the 1950s, a few envied families owned a black and white television, and by the 1970s color television began to replace the older sets. Fax machines and pagers began to appear in the 1980s, followed closely by cellular phones in the 1990s. The appearance of personal computers emerged in the last 10 years, but it was just in the last 2 years that software was developed enabling common use of a global system of interactive, multimedia communication, known as the Internet, which contains the World Wide Web (2). Wait till you see what comes with this technology: movie making and computer video conferencing, video phone conferencing (3), shared laboratories (4); what's next? Atlases for the Sprague-Dawley rat, rhesus monkey, and pigmy goat are available on the Internet and contain magnetic res-