COLUMN ONE : To Trade Wars From Star Wars? : The government research Establishment talks of making industry more competitive. But, with labs geared to a Cold War world, to some that seems like mission impossible.
During the morning rush hour in Northern New Mexico, an unbroken line of cars wends its way out of a high desert valley and into the Jemez Mountains, heading for the secluded mesa that is home to Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The concrete-and-steel structures of the lab, some surrounded by razor wire and guard towers, ramble across 43 square miles of rocky ridges and pine trees. None of its 1,835 buildings are visible from the long, windy access road below. The 49-year-old laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb, stands as a kind of scientific Shangri-La, a hidden outpost where some of the nation’s top scientists pursue their work in blissful isolation.
Such a remote location was considered a necessity back in 1942, when the federal government commandeered a tiny boarding school and made it home to the Manhattan Project. Even after the curtain of secrecy that denied the very existence of Los Alamos was lifted, a pristine mountain setting seemed appropriate for the crown jewel of the Cold War science Establishment.
But today, with the Soviet Union in tatters and America’s technological preeminence in question, the physical isolation of Los Alamos stands as a metaphor for the cultural isolation of much of America’s government-funded research.
The federal government is spending more than $70 billion a year on a research and development system designed for the military imperatives of the 1950s. Traditional Cold War “missions”--weapon development, nuclear energy and related physics research, and space exploration--account for three-quarters of all federal research spending.
Now, there is talk of a new role for the world-famous research labs such as Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. As corporate research spending stagnates and America suffers body blows in fiercely competitive world trade, the impressive brain power of the labs’ scientists and the muscle of their facilities are being promoted as national resources that can give U.S. industry an overdue high-technology boost.
“Technology transfer,” the catch-all phrase for moving innovations from the laboratory to the market, is the order of the day. Lab managers and researchers, eager to spread the word about their technical capabilities, have even engaged in some cross-country show-and-tell.
In January, they held a science fair in Detroit to woo the auto industry. In April, it was on to Albuquerque for a meeting with the computer industry. “The labs have expertise that covers the entire spectrum of technologies that are interesting to this industry,” Sandia National Laboratory director Al Narath told the assembly of several hundred computer researchers and lab scientists. “We’re taking our new mandate for technology transfer very seriously.”
But can the labs that built the atomic bomb, launched the nuclear energy industry and secured America’s position as the world’s leading scientific power also help build a better car or computer chip?
“The labs have never shown any talent for commercialization,” scoffs Roland Schmitt, president of Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute and former head of research at General Electric. “The way they’re structured, the cost-effectiveness is going to be very low.”
Call for Overhaul
To critics such as Schmitt, nothing less than an overhaul of the laboratory system is needed. They charge that high costs, slow decision-making and organizational structures geared to the unique challenges of building fail-safe weapon systems all render the labs incapable of playing a major role in fast-moving commercial industries.
“Ideally, what you’d do is stop spending the money and start some new labs,” Schmitt says.
If an overhaul comes, it won’t come without a fight from the nation’s government research Establishment and its many powerful friends.
The Bush Administration is eager to preserve weapon research, and its newfound interest in technology transfer doesn’t signal any fondness for schemes that smack of “industrial policy.” At the Department of Energy, which oversees nine big “multi-program” laboratories and about 20 smaller facilities, a special task force recently recommended against any broad reforms.
Congress, though it has initiated many commercial technology programs, remains skittish about tampering with a research system that provides thousands of good jobs in dozens of states. Despite the budget crisis, research funding--channeled with little coordination through the departments of Defense and Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and many other agencies--continues to rise. For the fiscal year beginning this fall, the Bush Administration has proposed a 3% increase in R & D spending, to $75.7 billion.
Yet challenges are mounting. The House of Representatives last month stunned the scientific community by canceling funding for the superconducting super collider, an $8-billion physics laboratory under construction in Texas. That vote put the research and development Establishment on notice that advanced research is no longer politically sacred.
Targets in Peace
The three nuclear weapon labs--Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore in Northern California, and Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque--are obvious targets for politicians in search of a peace dividend. After watching their combined budgets double to more than $3.5 billion a year during the military buildup of the 1980s, they face a future devoid of major new weapon systems.
General science facilities like Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, Brookhaven Laboratory on Long Island and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have not escaped scrutiny, either. Although some government science programs, notably in the health sciences, are considered very successful, critics complain of inefficiency and an obsession with so-called high-energy physics--a discipline that’s closely linked to nuclear weapon and energy technologies.
Researchers and administrators that run the government R & D effort concede that the labs must change, but reject the notion that they must shrink.
“I don’t think the nation can afford to reduce its investment in R & D,” says John Nuckolls, the low-key physicist who serves as director of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a $1.1-billion-a-year facility that competes with Los Alamos for nuclear weapon work. “So what we’re discussing is how to distribute those funds. . . . We’ve got decades of investment here. Why not use it?”
Scientists like Brian E. Newnam, a veteran Los Alamos physicist, are eager to demonstrate how those investments can boost competitiveness. In a tidy Los Alamos building that pulses with computer monitors, electronic test equipment and high-powered magnets, Newnam is working on a scheme to turn a laser built for the “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative into a machine for making advanced computer chips.
The so-called free electron laser can generate more power and be tuned more accurately than other types of lasers. Since the early 1980s, it has been under development as a promising means of shooting down enemy missiles.
But Newnam has long had his eye on a very different application. In 1987, at a meeting of chip industry scientists and Defense Department officials, he showed how the laser might be used as a “light source” for printing the ever-tinier circuit patterns necessary for future generations of computer chips.
“There was a lot of resistance in industry, because this was a huge machine,” Newnam recalls. To be economical, the laser would have had to drive 15 or 20 chip production lines simultaneously--a practical option only for a few very large companies--and Newnam concedes that he initially resisted entreaties to come up with a smaller, more manageable design.
But by 1989, “Star Wars” budget cuts were slicing into the laser program, and Newnam and his colleagues redoubled their efforts. Three chip firms--Motorola, Texas Instruments and Intel--were persuaded to lend moral support. The lab invested about $1 million, and in November of last year, the Department of Energy agreed to give Newnam’s team $3 million out of its newly established commercial technology fund.
Joint Projects
A host of such commercial technology projects--some jointly funded by the government and private companies--are now under way. Livermore researchers are working with dozens of companies to enhance a sophisticated computer code used for 3-D modeling. At Los Alamos, the Superconductivity Pilot Center supports firms trying to develop compounds that conduct electricity without resistance. A number of Fortune 500 companies, including IBM and AT & T, use the National Synchrotron Lightsource accelerator at Brookhaven for computer chip research, medical diagnostics and more.
Just as the National Institutes of Health laboratories work closely with the medical and pharmaceutical industries--and are widely credited with helping to spur the biotechnology revolution--so the Department of Energy labs hope to build broad and enduring links to the electronics and heavy manufacturing firms.
“Before, I’d solve a problem, and then if the military wasn’t going to use it, I’d put it back on the shelf,” says Richard L. Landingham, a materials scientist at Livermore, gesturing toward shelves full of exotic compounds carefully sealed in plastic bags. He’s now working on a project with Caterpillar and North Star Steel to create a new kind of high-strength steel.
“I’m all enthused about driving it into industry,” says Landingham. “It’s a refreshing thing to have happen.”
But commercial projects are a small piece of the lab research pie--and are likely to remain so.
Out of more than $3 billion spent on defense programs at the Department of Energy laboratories, for example, only $50 million is currently allocated for cooperative R & D projects with industry, although that sum is set to increase. At Livermore, 18 cooperative R & D ventures are in place, but their total budget is just $33 million, spread over several years, compared with an annual lab budget of $1.1 billion.
Even the physical scale of commercial projects is small by comparison. The Superconductivity Pilot Center at Los Alamos occupies a suite of rooms in a small, prefab building, and it makes use of a handful of modest laboratories next door. It stands in sharp contrast to the hulking cement structures that house the nuclear reactors and particle accelerators.
At Livermore, the commercial projects seem almost trivial when matched against the $80-million-a-year Nova laser program for nuclear fusion or the controversial $110-million-a-year “Star Wars” program known as “Brilliant Pebbles.”
Just as military contractors have had trouble competing in civilian industries, where low costs and the ability to respond quickly to changing conditions are essential, so the labs face cultural, financial, and bureaucratic barriers in trying to change their orientation.
Piper Cole, associate general counsel at Sun Microsystems, learned about some obstacles in the way of greater laboratory-industry cooperation when she set out to negotiate a standard set of terms and conditions for cooperative research projects involving computer companies.
“Their basic attitude was: ‘We’re here from the government. We want to help you. Do it our way,’ ” she recalls.
Grinding Gears
Cole’s endeavor began in December, 1990, when a group of computer company executives met with Richard G. Darman, the powerful White House budget director. He asked for their help in nudging the labs toward commercial research.
The computer firms identified one major problem as the unacceptably slow pace of negotiations on cooperative research and development agreements, which raise tricky issues of technology ownership and access to proprietary information.
When Department of Energy attorneys looked at an industry team’s first draft of a model agreement, she says, “they threw up all over it. We were getting stonewalled.”
It wasn’t simple stubbornness. The computer firms were seeking exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act in order to protect proprietary technologies--even though the joint projects would involve taxpayer money. This basic conflict between public and private interests has long been a problem in government-industry research.
Entrenched Culture
Cole says the DOE finally came around only after the chief executives of Unisys, Digital Equipment and Cray Research met with Secretary of Energy James D. Watkins last fall. The model agreement was completed in March. Yet even now, Cole says, some DOE field offices are resisting signing accords that conform to the model.
Just the cost of operating the labs is an obstacle to cooperation. The labs have large standing “faculties” of scientists and a network of advanced facilities. Individual scientists stay with projects from beginning to end--an expensive structure designed for large-scale, long-term weapon development efforts.
Critics such as Erich Bloch, former director of the National Science Foundation, say industry needs a stronger voice in determining the direction of lab research. Now, he says, their input comes after lab programs are already under way.
“We have to reorient their priorities,” he says. “You could take away 20% of their funds and tell them they get it back when they involved industry.”
Schmitt of Rennselaer Polytechnical Institute calls the labs’ current approach “chuck wagon technology. You cook it up in a big pot, dish it out, and then say, ‘Come and get it.’ ” For R & D of commercial relevance, he says, “the people who are going to be in on it have to prepare the meal.”
Newnam’s chip research program at Los Alamos provides a case study. The lab took a technology already under development for other purposes and effectively “sold” it to the Department of Energy as a promising commercial technology. Yet the companies that would use the technology weren’t impressed enough to put their own money on the table.
Only now has the DOE begun to put together an industry panel to review systematically which approaches to advanced chip-making deserve government funds.
“The cultures of the labs are not constructed in any way, shape or form to meet the needs of commercial industry,” says Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee and a strong supporter of federally funded research. “Can they learn that? I have not been impressed so far.”
Brown has proposed a major reform: consolidating all nuclear weapon development at Los Alamos and converting Livermore into a civilian technology lab modeled on the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md.
Separately, a National Academy of Sciences panel headed by former defense secretary and one-time Livermore Lab director Harold Brown recently recommended that lab funding be pared by $1 billion a year to finance a new, quasi-governmental civilian technology corporation.
These proposals have elicited a chilly response from almost everybody involved in managing the laboratory system. Lawrence Livermore’s Nuckolls and Siegfried S. Hecker, director of Los Alamos, both run through an identical set of arithmetic showing that Brown’s proposal would save “only” $100 million a year while sacrificing the benefits of inter-lab competition.
Weapon lab directors say they still have plenty of work to do in verifying arms control agreements, assuring the safety of the nuclear stockpile and cleaning up horrendous nuclear pollution problems at some weapon manufacturing facilities. They also have a role in non-military research ranging from the human genome project to geothermal and solar energy.
At the general science labs, officials note defensively that their programs are tiny compared to other government expenditures. “If you take that $70 billion in R & D, most of it is D. I think we’re underspending on the R,” says Nicholas P. Samios, the outspoken director of Brookhaven Laboratory. “If we stopped funding high-energy physics, what would happen? Nothing for 20 or 30 years,” but by that time America will have lost its treasured position as the leading science nation in the world, he says.
Familiar Visions
Nuckolls, when discussing the value of non-military research at Livermore, focuses on fusion energy, which for decades has been touted as a possible solution to the world’s energy problems. “At $300 million to $350 million a year, the country’s investment (in fusion research) is a good investment,” says Nuckolls. “We have a good chance of coming up with power plants that have a good chance of being economical.”
Yet the government’s record on nuclear energy programs, stretching back to the early days of Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, is littered with false promises about safety and cost-effectiveness.
Assessing the value of long-term scientific research projects is, of course, difficult. Results don’t become evident until long after most of the money has been spent, and even clear successes can be difficult to quantify when they involve advancing human knowledge.
Even critics agree that the labs house a remarkable collection of smart scientists and good facilities. But the labs have yet to show that they have a meaningful role to play in boosting the competitiveness of American industry.
