One of the primary goals of these wars was the quest for the Holy Grail, the cup used by Jesus at the last supper. The following is a listing of the great quests of chemistry. Scientific advances can be put into two categories, revolutionary advances and evolutionary advances. Revolutionary advances are those break throughs that open up a whole new field of research or solve entire classes of problems. Revolutionary advances occur fairly seldom.
Evolutionary advances are slow improvements made over a period of time.
The scientific community is very good at making evolutionary improvements, i.e. we expect that next years computers will be faster than this years and that this trend will continue. However, we do not expect man kind to achieve the complete genetic engineering of any organism over night. The items listed are those which I feel would most benefit the human race, the earth and our understanding of chemistry. The numbering is for convenience and not a reflection of either importance or availability of funding. Some of these are seeing rapid advances and others are almost completely stagnant at this time.