Inside Bell Labs: Excitement On The Bench; Concern on High

Inside Bell Labs: Excitement On The Bench; Concern On High AUTHOR: SHARON BEGLEY Date: September 05, 1988 Researchers have never felt freer, but some lab heads and a prominent former manager see major changes since divestiture The stockholder was annoyed. Why, he demanded, was AT&T paying Thomas Gradel, a middle-aged scientist, to tromp around the Jungles of Brazil studying ants, when the dollars could be better used to fatten up Bell’s notoriously meager dividends? The irate stockholder might equally well have asked about J. Anthony Tyson the astronomer on AT&T’s payroll who ricochet, between observatories in Hawaii and Chile to peer at galaxies at the far reaches of the universe. The answer is that their employer believes in the promise of long-term payoffs provided by basic research endeavors such theirs, despite the long-term investment they require. That, of course, has been the conventional wisdom about Bell Labs. For 62 years the Labs has been the premier corporate research facility engaging in unfettered basic and applied research. Gradel and Tysons predecessors spawned sound motion pictures, the transistor, the solar cell, the laser, and—that god send to secretaries—Touch-Tone telephone dialing. And their efforts have garnered seven Nobel Prizes in physics, more than any other industrial rial lab. But since the day AT&T was forced to divest itself of it. local operating companies and enter a brave new world of competition without a government-guaranteed monopoly to protect it and its profit margin, rumors have abounded that the scientists who have always run Bell Labs are losing out to the money men in AT&T’s hierarchy. Bemoans one top Bell scientist, "They’re obsessed with numbers now. Everything is the bottom line." Then he shakes his head ruefully “Ross,” he says, speaking of the Labs’ longtime president, Ian Ross, “has lost a lot of power.” Needless to say, Ross wouldn’t accept this; and, in fact, the numbers suggest that Bell Labs is still being well supported. For example, 10% of the budget is allotted to basic research, a figure that is the same as it’s always been. The total Labs budget is up from $2 billion in the year before divestiture and $1.9 billion in 1984, to $2.66 billion this year. The number of employees, which dropped from 22,000 to 19,000 between 1983 and 1984 as some were transferred to the research arms of the operating companies, is up to 21,681 as of February of this year. Of those, about 1,000 are in basic research as opposed to development, roughly the same proportion as in the past. ‘The scope of R&D has enlarged, if anything, since the breakup,” says Ross, “Our R&D goals have changed now that we’re not responsible for the end-to-end [phone] network," a task siphoned off in part to the local “Baby Bells.” Now, says the engineer-turned manager, the Labs researches “information management and movement, not just telecommunications.” But Ross’s numbers don’t convince everybody. Edward David, retired president of Exxon Research and Engineering Co., and former science adviser to President Nixon, has publicly voiced concern that if things got tough, AT&T would be forced to scale back its commitment to the Labs. In an interview with The Scientist he went further “[Bell Labs is] no longer an ideal environment in which to carry out revolutionary and risky research,” David said bluntly. “Any time you have a company subject to the usual pressures of competition and the Wall Street crowd, you run the risk of having to respond in ways that are not ideal for fundamental research.” He may know more than most outsiders—he spent 20 years on the technical staff of the Labs. Whether or not he’s right, have such concerns wended their way into the maze of laboratories inside Bell Labs? To find out, The Scientist roamed the halls of Bell Labs, and found that if power has indeed shifted away from the control of the top-echelon scientists, those in the Labs—Gradel, Tyson and others—don’t sense the change. Indeed, most appear to be as content as ever. Take Daniel Chemla, a physicist known for his outstanding work directing the Labs’ quantum electronics division. Laboring in a windowless office in Holmdel, N.J., Chemla says that he has found the most scientific freedom he has known throughout his career. Chemla is exploring the behavior of electrons in extremely small devices. To move information—AT&T’s main business—faster and more efficiently, devices such as semiconductor chip have to get smaller and smaller. “We’re reaching the point where the devices we want are so small that the very physics of the electrons is different,” explains Chemla. When an electron is forced into a region only a few tens or hundreds of atoms thick it. behavior changes. Chemla is trying to identify those changes. One is that the electrons move with less resistance when they travel along thin layers than when they scatter throughout the material. This means that the new, smaller devices can be much more efficient “We’re seeing the beginning of a revolution in semi-conductor physics,” claims Chemla, “engineering the semi-conductor down to the dimensions of a few atoms.” To Chemla, this is basic, not applied research, even though any progress he can make will surely benefit his employer directly. In fact, he views his work as esoteric science and, for him, the Labs’ policy of funding such research translates into a feeling of complete freedom to pursue paths that have no obvious applications for tomorrow, but just may find a place in tomorrow’s tomorrow. Says Chemla, “The day Bell Labs loses contact with basic science is the day we become like any other industrial lab.” If this is freedom, Chemla ought to know it Unlike many scientists, he has worked in academia as well as in government labs, giving him a rare peek into science in vastly different environments. Born in Tonisia and educated in France, he spent a year as a Fellow at Stanford University in 1973, dabbling in general relativity, and then returned to France, where he headed a lab at the government’s National Center for Telecommunications Research. The differences in culture are striking to the physicist “In France I couldn’t explain anything to the bureaucrats [who run the labs],” recalls Chemla. “They were just accountants trying to balance the books You had to explain exactly what you intended, but most scientists need the freedom to adjust their research along the way.” So Chemla joined Bell in 1981, primarily because he perceived that the scientists there were in control of their own fates. What impressed him most—and still does—is the fact that virtually all of the Labs’ managers come from the bench. “I can take the best journals of 10 years ago,” Chemla emotes, “and find the names [of our managers as authors of important papers].” He adds, “And I can talk to them on purely scientific terms, whether it’s about buying equipment I need or whatever. We’re talking science and not politics.” For Chemla and many of his peers, there are additional benefits derived from the policy of promoting from within. At Bell, they insist, managers do not keep researchers from following their own interests. An example cited is last year’s rush by Bell Labs materials scientists, chemists, and physicists into high-temperature superconductivity. The exodus from their previous areas of inquiry was triggered when the researchers recognized a sizzling-hot field and wanted to be part of history, it did not stem from a conscious managerial decision to reshuffle manpower. David Miller, head of photonic switching and Chemla’s boss, defends this practice of managerial laissez-faire, somewhat surprisingly, as practicaL Says Miller: “It’s a self-regulating phenomenon; if areas are really interesting, people will stay in them.” What’s more, he adds. “You need this system because no one is smart enough to know where the next breakthrough will come.” If people leave field X in droves, that’s an indication to managers like Miller that X is no longer fertile. But whatever Chemla, his colleagues, and managers feel about the freedom the Labs affords them, the research they perform—as blue-sky as it may seem—always carries some long-term AT&T goal. Gradel, the ant man, for instance, is wandering around the Amazon because he is a corrosion chemist trying to find out how communications equipment fails in various environments; he has found that when ants in the jungle die, their rotting carcasses release formic acid gas, which becomes a major cause of acid rain there. And acid rain is one of the principal causes of cable rot Meanwhile, Tyson, the galaxy gazer, is trying to make a better “charge-coupled device,” a bit of microelectronics invented by Bell Labs which turns a faint ray of light—as from a distant star—into an electronic signal. These realities—having practical, bottom-line goals even while pursuing basic research—clearly characterize Bell Labs as an industrial laboratory, distinct from academia. Scientists at the Labs are also subject to a different kind of pressure than are their academic peers. On the one hand, Bell scientists have access to expensive equipment and support without the academics’ bane of filling out government grant proposals—AT&T picks up the tab. And the starting salary for a new Ph.D. in physics is $45,000—a number that helps encourage 80% of the students of- fered jobs at the Labs to accept. But this “freedom” translates into another—many would say more intense—kind of pressure. As Wayne Knox, a laser physicist who works with Chemla, remembers, “When you first arrive, they put you in an empty lab and say, ‘Okay, you have two years to become famous. Here’s a few hundred thousand dollars—don’t mess up.' Being part of Bell Labs also means submitting papers to the company’s patent lawyers before publication. They evaluate whether the findings should be withheld until a patent can be applied for, or announced quickly, to keep competitors from patenting the process. (As of this March, the Labs had been issued 21,700 patents, an average of one a day since its founding in 1925.) But commercial worries haven’t broadly prevented the Labs’ staffers from running into their academic peers on the lecture circuit. If the Bell patent office doesn’t think the research will bring at least $10 million in royalties, “they tell us to get out of there,” says Wayne Knox. “It actually leaves us very free to talk about things.” And talk they do: With more than 3,400 Ph.D.’s, the Labs publishes or presents more than 4,000 original papers and talks every year. To be sure, the breakup has brought some changes. To Chemla, the most significant is the greater emphasis on getting the research scientists to talk to the development staff. Managers let it be known that, as Chemla puts it, “as soon as something is on the basic research front] is understood, our colleagues know about it.” This does not mean anything so crude as monthly meetings—”Nothing like that would work here,” Chemla says firmly. Rather, department heads get together every few months to swap news, and expect most of their interactions to occur informally a phone call to tell someone in development that, ‘Hey, now we know what electrons do when you confine them to tiny spaces.’ Chemla has, in fact, been having such conversations with his counterparts in development, though his work has not yet pointed the way to a specific device that they can work on. But if Chemla’s is the view from the heart of the Labs, former presidential science advisor David may well be articulating a privately expressed concern of the Labs’ heads that, indeed, the divestiture has had a subtle effect on this national institute. “The output of research is not as pioneering as it was, it’s not as self-starting as it once was,” David says. “The fellows at the bench don’t see it. From there it’s hard to tell what’s actually happening —you yourself are getting good results. But if you ask the overarching question of the effect of divestiture on the Labs as a whole, you get a different answer.” Whether the perception of increased pressure and attrition of power at the top will eventually filter down to the bench scientists remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Chemla takes a coffee break. with his collaborators. They gather for espresso under a red-Gothic-letter sign proclaiming this the “Bell Laboratories Femto Cafe." They discuss why the results are coming up as they are, what kind of laser to use and howto modify it, andwho they should rope into a collaboration. The conversation is much the same as it was at lunch not a lot different than it was yesterday and the daybefore. It appears to be life as usual at Bell Labs. Sharon Begley is the science editor for Newsweek.

Inside Bell Labs: Excitement On The Bench; Concern on High

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