There’s No Future Without Research : The work of Lawrence Livermore and other national laboratories stretches way beyond defense; their continuation is vital to our well-being as a people.

There’s a middle-aged man lying in a grave in Peru. His Moche civilization, 300 years after Caesar, developed a technique for electroplating gold onto copper that would be unknown in Europe for centuries to come. His people built irrigation systems to rival the California Aqueduct. Then something happened.

The gentleman in the grave in Peru belonged to a society that chose progress through creation of an infrastructure advancing agricultural and artistic achievements. But at some point, advancement gave way to implosion, and his people eventually ceased to exist as a recognizable group. We don’t know why.

There are nine multiprogram laboratories, three of them nuclear-weapons laboratories, under the auspices of the U.S. Energy Department. They have thrived during the past 50 years through congressional largess in response to national-security concerns. These labs have brought together researchers whose ability and experience cannot be replicated. Although funding in past decades has been predicated on defense needs, benefits have spilled over into industry and medicine. For instance, the Lawrence Livermore lab is engaging in subcellular research. The spinoffs, though unpredictable, may help us understand how malignancies develop or can be treated. At Los Alamos, software has been developed to help map the human genome, helping us understand and treat genetic diseases. Even weather predictions may become more accurate as a result of research at Lawrence Livermore.

But with the end of the Cold War, funding for anything military has fallen out of favor and the mission of the national labs has become murky. To address these issues, a reevaluation was undertaken that resulted in recommendations for restructuring of the labs’ mission, consolidation and cutting red tape.

Basic scientific research is a hard sell. It makes no promise of success. Setting up the hardware to do the research is so costly as to be incomprehensible to most folks--perhaps even to members of Congress, who gave thumbs down to completing the superconducting super collider. As money becomes more scarce, layers of administrators and paperwork have been added to “supervise” research, further frustrating scientists. And it’s easier to comprehend and vote for people-related issues than for those that offer only the possibility of future benefits. Grandma needs a walker now, and those poor teen-age mothers on “Oprah” could use some job training. Lawrence Livermore’s national ignition facility, using lasers for limited fusion, just can’t stack up. And some citizens’ groups oppose anything that involves nuclear research, regardless of the ultimate payoff. Tri-Valley Cares, for example, is a Northern California group that seems to have less than a full grasp of the implications for basic physics promised by the ignition project as temperatures as hot as the sun’s interior are generated.

Societies that have progressed beyond the hunter-gatherer level build up excess energy in the form of time and talent. This energy can be applied in one of three ways. The society can tread water, not creating anything new, just maintaining the status quo. It can implode, wasting its talents in frivolity, as did the Roman Empire. Or it can raise itself up, using excess resources for steady advancement. Static societies are a luxury of earlier times, which leaves forward or backward movement as the basic choices today.

We are now at the same crossroad the Moche faced 1,200 years ago. We can elect, through our national-research labs and through enlightened policies that favor private research and development, to advance research, including nuclear physics, and create energy sources for the future. Or we can decide that the welfare and entitlement functions of the government take precedence. Advocate social spending above research and you’ve helped a few people, put a lot of researchers out of work and lost expertise forever.

I’d rather see Lawrence Livermore get their lasers than Grandma get her walker. Because if Grandma gets her walker, her false teeth, her Winnebago; if Uncle Fred is declared totally disabled because his back hurts and he is too lazy to do the exercises to make it better--then some day my grandchildren will sit on a polluted old planet bereft of energy. And unable to reach the stars. Somehow, I think that gentleman in Peru would understand.