Cross-Cultural Synergy Produces Good Science At Synchrotron Labs

UPTON, N.Y.—In the middle of Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, Long Island, is a building whose gleaming white curves, bay windows, and identifying sign on the front lawn cause it to stand out from the barracks architecture prevailing at the rest of the site. The building is the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), and the composition of the scientists who work in its intenor is as unusual as the exterior. Scientists from AT&T Bell Laboratories examining the surface structure of semiconductors are camped next to a team from Stanford, Cornell, Stony Brook, and Brookhaven doing coronary angiography. Catalysis experts from Exxon Corp. are adjacent to Brookhaven’s protein crystallographers. Harvard chemists work side by side with Yale solid-state physicists. These strange bedfellows have been thrown together by synchrotron radiation, a phenomenon whose range of application is so vast that it has forced scientists into collaborations that cut across not only disciplinary lines, but also across the “cultural” boundaries that divide scientists who work for national laboratories, universities, industries, and government. It’s a story that is spreading throughout several scientific and technological fields today, as both industry and government work for more efficient technology transfer, while academic researchers welcome the additional expertise their industrial colleagues can supply. But forming and fostering such intercultural collaborations is anything but easy, and the case of synchrotron radiation illustrates the need for the art of managing such complex multidisciplinary efforts to grow along with the science itself. Like many invaluable tools of science, synchrotron radiation began life as an accursed nuisance. In the late 1940s, builders of synchrotrons, a type of particle accelerator, encountered the unpleasant fact that electrons forced by magnetic fields to travel in a circle radiate energy tangentially to their paths, similar to the way a spinning wheel throws off mud. This indicated a point of diminishing returns for accelerators; at some scale anyextra energy added would promptly be radiated away, effectively limiting the size of the principal tool of particle physics. But scientists soon learned that “synchrotron radiation,” as the nuisance was called, had a unique set of properties. Unlike all other light sources, synchrotron radiation consists of a continuous spectrum. Moreover, the light could be made extremely intense and was finely tunable. Finally, synchrotron radiation proved to be an ideal probe of the surface structures of materials, for, unlike protons and electrons, photons interact very weakly with matter and thus alter it only minimally. Such features made synchrotron radiation an ideal research tool in areas as diverse as absorption spectra, angiography, and the structure of proteins and semiconductors. So rapidly grew its uses that a second generation of synchrotron radiation machines—including Brookhaven's NSLS and Stanford’s Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL)—was planned in the mid-1970s. Martin Blume, Brookhaven’s deputy director and original project director of the NSLS, arid his team realized, however, that to succeed they needed the cooperation of industry right from the start, “When we began envisioning the NSLS,” Blume says, “we [recognized] that the great diversity of possible research programs and instrumentation implied that the planning should be made by users rather than by laboratory committees. That way, you could preserve the virtues of small science—low cost, spontanegy, the flexibility to, change directions quickly, and the ability to try out an idea that is a little bit harebrained without having to persuade a stubborn committee.” But a nunber of hurdles stood in the way of bringing this to pass. One was a mixed bag qf restrictions on the part of funding agencies and universities against supporting industrial research. A related difficulty took the form of conflicting ideas on how to charge industry for the cost of services if they were allowed to participate. A final obstacle was the existence of certain “cultural attitudes” that characterized the different approaches of scientists from government, industry, the universities, and the national laboratories to science. Blume says, “DOE [Department of Energy] scientists tend to share a cultural view that government shouldn’t be giving things away to business. Laboratory scientists tend to share the view that only they know how to do things right and that other scientists shouldn’t get involved. Industry scientists have to keep in back of their minds that what’s important is costing it out” Both DOE (which runs the NSLS) and Stanford University, for instance, did not allow their funds to support proprietary research by outside scientists unless the outsider paid “full cost ery”—not only operating costs, but also an additional fee covering part of the construction. In practice, however, industrial users had been performing basic research at the national laboratories for years without paying full cost recovery; the laboratories circumvented the rule by declaring that such users were “collaborators” on laboratory projects. But such a ruse could not work for something on the scale of the NSLS, a huge, single-source facility with nearly a hundred beam lines to be made available to multiple users. A few individuals argued that industries who used the source should be forced to obey the regulations and pay full cost recovery. But apportioning such costs fairly among ever-changing ‘groups would have been extremely difficult; Blume complained sarcastically that he would have to install coin-operated shutters on the beam ports to cut off the photons when the money ran out, like those in binoculars at tourist traps. More importantly, the cost would have discouraged precisely those people the NSLS planners most wanted to involve. “Full cost recovery might not have bothered the usual suspects— IBM and AT&T,” Blume says. “But it would have made even the richest of the other industrial organizations pause, and university people would have been blown out of water; entire NSF grants would have gone to pay for the light source. We clearly had to get the policy changed.” Cultural Attitude Blume, and other proselytizers of synchrotron radiation such as. SSRL director Art Bienenstock, worked hard to do so. Reinforcing opposition to changing the regulations, however, were the cultural attitudes dividing scientists. DOE officials were reluctant to dole out money that might wind up in the pockets of industry, while university and laboratory scientists resented the fact that, while they had course loads and committee work, industry scientists had no such burdens and would essentially be getting beam time for free; many felt that they should have to fork over some amount of money to demonstrate that they were really serious. Blume says, “Their attitude was, "I’ve got one hand tied behind my back—tie one of his behind him.”’ Finally, in 1979, the NSLS advocates prevailed, and DOE waived charges against outsiders for using the facility, with two provisos. First, the research had to be “of documented programmatic interest to the DOE”; and second, the user had to be performing basic research, defined as research for which the user “agrees to publish the results of the research with dispatch in the scientific or technical literature.” DOE insisted on reserving for itself rights to any patents that grew from the work, and allowed proprietary research only if the user paid full cost recovery. But Brookhaven’s continued pressure on the Energy Department finally secured a class waiver for any patents obtained through research at the NSLS, further encouraging industrial participation. The NSLS has grown ever since, and today has about 90 beam lines, with about a quarter of its 850 or so users from industry. “We’ve often been told [by both DOE and industry] to make our user facilities more open," says Blume. "Damn it, we had to break them open” While the NSLS officials were confronting DOE, SSRL officials were breaking down similar barriers at Stanfor& To clarify the status of industrial users at the SSRL, Bienenstock had to confront both the SSRL’s funding agency, NSF, and its home institution, Stanford. Though NSF was receptive to industrial participation at the lab, it was under pressure from the American Council of Independent Laboratories, which had an ongoing complaint about university researchers who used federal funds to set up services in competition with the council’s constituents. The questions posed by the SSRL inspired NSF to reexamine its entire policy toward funding facilities with industrial participation, and the outcome was “Important Notice 91,” an NSF policy paper, still in effect, which walks a careful line between encouraging “unique facilities” with industrial collaboration potential like the SSRL, and avoiding competition with industry. More of a hurdle was Stanford’s attitude, given that ‘the university forbade proprietary research on campus. The university would, however, allow a one-year delay (subsequently shortened to 90 days) in publication of research for patenting purposes, and SSRL and Stanford officials carrie to an agreement over work to be done at the SSRL consistent with this regulation. The SSRL now has 11 beam lines, 25 experimental stations, and 23 participating industries. “Most of the troublesome issues are resolved,”, says Blume. “What I’m trying to improve now’ is the intellectual community. I’d like to see people do more than perform experiments together and then return to their separate institutions. To do this, we plan to sponsor workshops and seminars to strengthen the interchange.” When the Stevenson-Wydler act was passed in 1981, requiring government labs with more than a $20 million budget and/or 200 or more individuals to establish an Office of Research and Technology Applications (ORTA) charged with the goal of ensuring that technology developed in the labs finds prompt application in the marketplace. Brookhaven’s NSLS experience stood it in good stead. “The ORTA regulations confirmed and extended policies and trends we already had in place,” says Blume. An example was a chance conversation in 1985 between an employee of the NSLS nd one from Brookhaven’s ORTA office, which led Brookhaven to establish a program to help Grumman Corp. and General Dynamics Corp. build tabletop synchrotron devices—for which there is a growing market to do X-ray lithography. “We want to teach them to knock the devices out the way GM knocks out Chevrolets,” says Seymour Baron, Brookhaven’s associate director of applied programs. “Inthe past,” says Tony Favale, a Grumman researcher who works at Brookhaven, “U.S. national laboratories would have worked for several years on a prototype to give to us, and then our engineers and scientists would have spent years flying to adapt it for the needs of industry; after all, you’ve got to be able to use the devices without physicists around. This way, they hear our input from the beginning, and by the time a prototype is ready our scientists have three years’ experience working with the devices.” The changes in government, laboratory, and university regulations inspired by the NSLS and SSRL have fostered closer collaborations not only among industry, government, laboratories, and universities at other synchrotron radiation sources now in the works, but also at other kinds of facilities, such as neutron-scattering labs and nuclear reactors. More importantly, however, changes have been wrought in the various ways in which science is practiced. “I have students who spend an awful lot of time on the floor of the SSRL,” says Bienenstock. “There, they meet some of the great industrial scientists in this field. My students know things that these scientists don’t, and those scientists obviously know a lot that my students don’t. An immense amount of interaction takes place between students and industrial researchers, and collaborations between them become a natural thing. Each group sees a different side of science.” On the other side of the country, Blume concurs. “The growth of large synchrotron radiation sources has thrown the different cultures of research science together closely for the first time. It hasn’t leveled the boundaries between them, and hopefully never will—there is room for different attitudes towards research. But it has made it possible for scientists of each culture to appreciate the others, and enable them to work together more effectively.” And it’s a rite of passage in science management that they both hope colleagues in other fields will experience. “This kind of interaction,” Bienenstock says, “might be reproduced in the future at a national magnet lab, for instance, or at any laboratory where there are unique facilities that can be made available a broad spectrum of the scientific and technological oommunity. Writer Robert P. Crease teaches philosophy of science at the State University of New York Stony Brook.

Cross-Cultural Synergy Produces Good Science At Synchrotron Labs

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Robert Crease

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July 1989

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