From Stud-Finding To Badger-Spying, National Labs Pursue A Host Of New And Very Different Challenges

Their redefined mission is leading researchers at DOE labs to take on unusual -- sometimes bizarre -- assignments At the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, researchers are taking the bang out of old munitions dumps, using a special group of TNT-eating microorganisms. Meanwhile, on a weapons-test site near Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., a remotely operated, minature robot helps biologists study the behavior of the American badger. Scenes like this are becoming more and more common at United States Department of Energy (DOE) labs as the facilities shift from their traditional focus on weapons development and energy investigations to new applications in a wide array of disciplines. They are responding to President Bill Clinton's mandate that the labs use their capabilities for more practical, economically worthwhile purposes (B. Goodman, The Scientist, July 25, 1994, page 1). In so doing, investigators from such diverse fields as materials science, computing and information management, laser technology, and energy research are applying their expertise to solve problems in disciplines and industries as varied as biomedicine, environmental science, and the automotive industry. It is not unusual for the projects to take researchers far afield from what they've been doing in the past. Supercomputing technology, for example, which was developed at many labs to facilitate weapons research, is now being used at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N. Mex., by computer scientists working with New York-based Citibank Corp. to reduce bank fraud. And at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, scientists, along with their colleagues in other DOE and university labs, are working to link the many sectors of the textile industry--the largest employer in the U.S.--via a computer network. Collaborations like these have Ropened up new vistasS for lab scientists, says Roger Lewis, director of technology utilization in the DOE Office of Technology Partnerships in Washington, D.C. In LewisUs view, these joint ventures have "exploded" since the 1989 passage of the National Competitiveness Technology Transfer Act. Other DOE officials and researchers agree, adding that although the labs' involvement in developing "offshoot" or cross-disciplinary technologies has been evolving and expanding over the last two decades, an explicit emphasis on industry collaboration is a comparatively recent development. The 1989 act established the cooperative research and development agreement, or CRADA, the purpose of which is to foster collaborative research between government labs and industry. Specifically, DOE offers private-sector partners rights to patents and other intellectual property from the joint research. DOE currently is engaged in more than 600 CRADAs with more than 500 industrial partners. The firms involved run the gamut from small, local companies to international conglomerates. For example, Oak Ridge has licensed the microbiological technology to convert TNT into a non-toxic form to nearby EODT Services, a two-year-old bioremediation company. Meanwhile, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is pooling resources with such giants as Digital Equipment Corp., headquartered in Maynard, Mass., and Cray Research Inc. of Eagan, Minn., to work in supercomputing. Scientists at DOE labs and their industry collaborators point out that there are many more examples of such swords- to-plowshares endeavors. In fact, one lab might even branch out to collaborate with the multibillion-dollar entertainment industry. Sandia is currently considering working on projects with Walt Disney World's Epcot Center. Although officials at both Sandia and Epcot refuse to discuss details at this time, a statement from Sandia does hint at the nature of potential relationships in the future. "Walt Disney World and Sandia National Laboratories have a common interest in providing an authentic vision of the future, enabled by science and technology. . . . We are conducting continual explorations about how these common interests can be furthered through a showcase opportunity to authentically represent the future to the public," said Pace VanDevender, director of Sandia's Center for National Industrial Alliances, in the statement. One defense-related radar-technology project at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory has spawned two industry partnerships so far, with about a half-dozen other applications waiting in the wings to be developed. "It's a spinoff from the Nova laser program here at Livermore,S says electrical engineer Tom McEwan of the multipurpose Rpocket radarS he developed. The cigarette-pack-sized radar sends out electrical pulses at a rate of more than 1 million per second. These bounce off an object and echo back to the detector to be interpreted on a display screen. Key advantages of the device, according to McEwan, are its low cost and high margin of safety. The hand-held radar, he claims, can be made for less than $10, and "poses no health hazard at all. The average emission level from the unit is a million times lower than a cellular phone." Zircon Inc., a Campbell, Calif.-based producer of electronic hand tools, has licensed the technology to develop a stud- finder for the do-it-yourself home-improvement market. And Amerigon Inc. in Burbank, Calif., is developing the device as a high-tech car component to warn drivers of objects or people behind them, among other automotive uses. McEwan envisions that the unit could also be used to locate earthquake survivors buried beneath fallen debris; in the sports and fitness industry; in home security; and in biomedicine. In the health-care field, he foresees, the device could be used as a high-quality stethoscope, as a non-contact patient monitor, and for three-dimensional imaging of the human body. "I showed this to a couple of M.D.'s, and they just flipped," McEwan says. In addition to industry-lab collaborations, many intriguing partnerships also arise from in-house research needs at the labs. Livermore laser scientist John Christensen, for example, is applying his expertise to learn more about the nonhuman creatures that inhabit the lab's land. Because of programs required by other federal agencies, such as the Fish and Wildlife Service, Livermore must monitor how certain weapons-research projects affect wildlife living on test sites. Since most of the 7,000-acre, non-nuclear-explosive test site--called Site 300--is desert, many of the areaUs animals live in burrows to escape the heat, according to recently hired wildlife biologist Jim Woollett. This habit poses a problem for monitoring such Site 300 inhabitants as the American badger and burrowing owl. Woollett went to Christensen with the dilemma. "John said, `Tell me exactly what you want.' And he went from there. It was marvelous," Woollett recalls. The result was ChristensenUs design and manufacture of a remotely operated robot that Woollett sends on spying missions down the holes of Site 300 burrowing animals. The device is called the Miniature Optical Lair Explorer, or simply MOLE. "I kind of like to describe it as an all-terrain vehicle, except that instead of having a person on top, it has a camera that rotates 360 degrees," says Woollett of the 5 x 5-inch, tethered robot, which sends images in real time to a television monitor on the surface. MOLE runs on treads taken from a toy tank; its "headlights" are red, light-emitting diodes; and its "brain" is an electronic circuit board attached to the camera. In addition to the opportunity to learn about the animals, he says, the project has given "a new awareness to a large scale of people" at the lab that life does exist below the test ground's surface. Of the MOLE project's potential for changing weapons-testing protocols, Woollett declares: "It is something that's coming. I think that it is a consideration that has just been brought to the surface, so I think that we'll see more of it in the future." Thus far, the animals don't seem to mind the intrusion. "With the red light--Lord knows why--they really don't react in an aggressive manner. At least they haven't yet," reports Woollett. Scientists at most DOE labs are working on another sort of vehicle. "The overall goal," says Mark Smith, technical group leader for the materials processing group at Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL) in Richland, Wash., "is to build clean, highly efficient vehicles." Teaming up with researchers at U.S. auto manufacturing giants Ford Motor Co., Chrysler Corp., and General Motors Corp., DOE lab scientists are working on the supercar of the future. Challenged by Clinton's 1993 Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles initiative--with a goal to produce an 80-mile-per-gallon, environmentally friendly car in the next decade--federal and industry investigators are feverishly collaborating to meet that objective. To do this, DOE labs, other federal agencies, and industry partners are developing technologies that will reduce vehicle emissions; lighten the heavier components of cars, such as the power train; and produce standard and new types of cars that will run on alternative fuels. PNL, for example, has $6 million in CRADAs with the "Big Three" automakers for fiscal year 1994. Specifically, PNL researchers are working on such items as light-weight aluminum auto parts, a hydrocarbon trap to reduce polluting emissions, and laser holographic techniques to examine fuel- combustion efficiency. Most of DOE's labs have become increasingly involved in other environmental science-related areas in the last decade, with department officials describing the labs' work in this field as a growth area. Bioremediation, alternative energy, and air and water pollution monitoring are only a few examples. In a three-year, $1.8 million CRADA, for instance, Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois is joining forces with Advanced Research Development Inc. (ARDI) of Athol, Mass., to develop a new type of solar energy material called Lumeloid. The material's inventor, Alvin M. Marks, president and chief scientist at ARDI, predicts that the material could "become a major power source for the world." Lumeloid is a stretchable, polarizing film embedded with molecular diodes--devices for conducting electricity in one direction. "When we get finished," Marks predicts, "we will have a structure which will collect light photon energy and direct that energy in one direction." Researchers on the project envision that consumers will be able to buy a roll of Lumeloid--nicknamed "solar-cell-on-a- roll"--in local hardware stores, place it in a panel and, via current-carrying wires, plug appliances directly into the sun's energy. Lumeloid's main advantages, according to Marks, are that "it's extremely clean. There's no waste generated, and it's easy to make. The [potential] decreased cost per watt is dramatic. We figure a cost of about $5 per square meter for the film and an output of 500 watts per square meter [of film] in bright sunlight." The total investment cost for the consumer, he adds, works out to be about 30 to 50 cents per peak watt, compared with $1 to $1.50 per watt for coal or oil-generated power. Marks and collaborators at Argonne also say that with its theoretical efficiency of 70 percent energy conversion, Lumeloid will need to be only about one- fifth the size of conventional solar cells to get the same amount of energy output. DOE and the biomedical community have been involved in collaborative research in a big way for nearly a decade, with DOE's substantial support of the Human Genome Project as one prime example. There are, however, dozens of other, less publicized innovations in bioscience that have also arisen from DOE projects, agency researchers and officials note. One such effort is taking place at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. A group of materials scientists and chemists headed by Deborah Charych has developed a biomolecular film to quickly and easily detect the flu virus. One part of the bluish-colored, double-layered film contains sialic acid sugars--a type of molecule that all known flu strains bind to--and the other part serves as the film's backbone. When an infected sample is dropped onto the film, the flu virus binds to the sialic acid sugars. This binding changes the structure of the backbone, causing the film to absorb a different wavelength of light. This changes the film's color from blue to red, indicating that the sample contains the flu virus. The film also has the potential to be used as an assay for screening new inhibitor compounds. Jon Nagy, a chemist on the team, claims that this method offers a more direct, less expensive way to detect viruses over such methods as the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, or ELISA. Charych says that her group is in discussions with several biomedical diagnostics companies to develop and market the film, but that as yet "no formal deals have been established." For information about interdisciplinary research at DOE contact Roger Lewis, DOE, 1000 Independence Ave., S.W., Washington, D.C. 20585; (202) 586-5388. Fax: (202) 586-8854. E-mail: roger.lewis@mailgw.er.doe.gov.

From Stud-Finding To Badger-Spying, National Labs Pursue A Host Of New And Very Different Challenges

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