Lawrence Berkeley Lab Expects Gain From Applied Research, Industry Ties

New chief sees future of less nuclear physics, more biomedical work, and more commercial projects. BERKELEY, CALIF.--Its main thoroughfare is still called Cyclotron Road, a relic of its days as the world's premier center for high-energy physics. But the name is rapidly becoming an anachronism. In just a few years, the last of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's big particle accelerators - the billion-electron-volt Bevalac - will be shut down. That will leave only a vintage 88-inch cyclotron at the institution where Ernest O. Lawrence invented the atom-smashing machines in the 1930s. Yet the shutdown of its antiquated accelerators is only one of the more dramatic signs of major change under way at LBL, which is one of three large national laboratories operated by the University of California for the Department of Energy. (The others are Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories, both major weapons centers.) Increasingly, LBL is moving away from what was once its hallmark - basic research in physics and chemistry - into such currently fashionable areas as biomedicine, environmental science, and energy studies. Under the leadership of Charles Shank, an electrical engineer recruited from the private sector, it is also seeking closer ties with industry. It is a trend that some observers believe some day could threaten the laboratory's vaunted independence and leadership. In its outward appearance LBL is as imposing as ever. Looking down from its spectacular hillside campus high over San Francisco Bay, it remains a model for the successful publicly funded research laboratory. Its 1,000 scientists and engineers - many of whom hold joint appointments at neighboring UC- Berkeley - continue to produce advances at a breathtaking pace. Just last year, in fact, scientists for the first time took pictures of a coil of naked" DNA - without a metallic coating - with an electron scanning tunneling microscope. It also has a way of getting into the news, as when LBL astrophysicist Clifford Stoll, now at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, two years ago helped track down a computer spy involved with a West German espionage ring. But today's LBL is a far different place from the one that helped usher in the atomic age and nurtured nine Nobel Prize winners. In the domed building that once housed LBL's 184-inch cyclotron, workers are erecting a huge synchrotron radiation generator called the Advanced Light Source (ALS). When it goes on line in 1993, the $100 million machine will be the brightest source of photons, in frequencies ranging from infrared to soft" X-rays, this side of the sun. The ALS, with its 1.5 GeV (billion electron volts) beam, will be able to probe deeply into the structure of atoms, provide images of fast chemical reactions, and explore biological processes at a fundamental level. This will be a national facility," says ALS director Jay Marx. Researchers will come from all over the country to use it." The ALS will begin operating just about the time that Bevalac fires its last heavy ions. And Marx, a one-time particle physicist, admits to a certain irony" in the fact that he is helping to lead LBL away from traditional accelerators. But part of the new technology is still home-grown, he notes with pride: The critical focusing magnets, known as undulators and wigglers, at the heart of the ALS are the creation of an LBL team led by engineer Klaus Holbach. LBL's new director, 46-year-old Charles Shank, represents a break from tradition for the laboratory. Though he holds his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from UC-Berkeley, Shank is the first director from private industry - the four previous directors were from academia. The former head of the electronics research laboratory at AT&T Bell Labs, Shank believes that one of his primary missions is to forge closer ties between the laboratory and the industrial world. "We have a responsibility to create new technologies, to train new people, and to develop new equipment," he says. "And we must get that done in a way that industry can make maximum use of it." Shank, who took over September 1, has yet to spell out how he plans to attain these goals. But he says that one way is for the lab to carry out the long-term industrial research that most companies no longer pursue because of their preoccupation with current income. "It's time for the national laboratories to step in and do it by example," he says. While emphasizing that he will strive to "maintain fundamental science as our lifeblood," he favors broadening LBL's activities and pursuing "a continuum of research that goes from the very basic to the applied." What most labs neglect, he believes, is the sort of research that falls between these extremes. "I'm not sure our national science policy has recognized this," he says. "We don't have a MITI [Ministry of International Trade and Industry], as do the Japanese, or a Eureka, as do the Europeans" - the latter a reference to the French-led European industrial development group. LBL officials point out that directors cannot radically alter the lab's policies overnight because of the power of senior scientists to choose their projects. But Shank is definitely tightening his control. A recent reorganization eliminated two associate directorships, clearing the way for laboratory chiefs to report more directly to him. He also plans to keep busy with his own research. A specialist in observing ultrafast phenomena, especially the activities of the protein rhodopsin, Shank has set up his own lab at LBL. "It's always humbling to do experiments," he says. --F.G. Still, the change in mission clearly distresses some LBL veterans. Glenn Seaborg, who won a 1951 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of plutonium and other transuranic elements, sees the decline of nuclear physics as something that should have been avoided." Others view the shifts as inevitable. Physicist Richard A. Muller, a protege of the late Luis Alvarez - another of LBL's Nobel laureates - thinks that the handwriting has been on the wall ever since Fermilab, outside Chicago, came on line in the early 1970s with what would develop into the world's most powerful accelerator. The creation of Fermilab, says Muller, made it clear that LBL would not be the center of high-energy physics." A member of a panel of younger staff scientists who authored a report that set the course for some of LBL's new directions a few years ago, Muller says, Our geography made it impossible. We have 130 acres on the side of a hill," space that is insufficient to house today's monster accelerators. Equally important, however, was a change in priorities from Washington. As politicians began to worry about the ability of United States industry to compete with the rest of the world, the Energy Department put pressure on LBL to look to new horizons. It urged a greater effort in areas that were perceived to have a more direct application to the nation's needs, such as materials science, biomedicine, and even the improvement of science teaching in the nation's secondary schools. Unlike its sister DOE labs, LBL doesn't do any classified work. This has spared it from the public protesters that regularly gather at the gates of Lawrence Livermore, some 30 miles away. But it hasn't kept it entirely immune from the strong political activism that is so much a part of the Berkeley scene. Muller, for example, notes that the city's status as a nuclear-free zone requires the lab to get permission for any shipments of radioactive materials. Despite the changing political winds, one constant is a tight financial picture. In the early 1980s, the lab's workforce had to be cut from nearly 4,000 people to its present level of just over 3,000 as the Reagan administration took a sharp axe to LBL's budget. Some of the hardest hit programs involved energy conservation and the environmental sciences. Nonetheless, LBL's former director, chemist David A. Shirley, was able to initiate several major new capital programs before he returned to full-time research and teaching last summer after nine years at the helm. Besides lobbying for ALS, he built a surface science and catalysis lab and an advanced materials lab, both of which were completed within the last two years. Shirley also managed to turn around LBL's budget. It is now running at about $245 million a year, up from $175 million a year only five years ago. More than 80% of its funding comes from DOE, although the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health make contributions to specific projects. However painful its decline as a center for high-energy physics may be for some of its veterans, LBL won't be short of sparkling new facilities and equipment. Apart from the ALS, the lab was recently chosen to be one of DOE's three centers for the Human Genome Project. The 15-year, $3 billion effort seeks to map and analyze every one of the 100,000 or so genes in the 46 human chromosomes. The task involves sequencing some 3 billion base pairs - the basic letters in the genetic alphabet. Under director Charles Cantor, a molecular and cell biologist recruited last year from Columbia University (along with more than a dozen of his co-workers), the center has already developed some of the advanced computer programs that will be essential to a quest that some say will revolutionize biomedicine in the next century. In the past few years, LBL has also established centers for advanced materials research, X-ray optics, and isotopic chemistry. It is also joining its neighbor, UC-Berkeley, in setting up a center for particle astrophysics. Working on what many astronomers expect to be the crown jewel of American optical astronomy, LBL physicist-engineer Jerry Nelson and his team designed the aspherical" optics and computer controls of the giant 10-meter Keck multimirror telescope now in the final stages of construction on the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. When they are turned to the heavens, the instrument's 36 hexagonal mirrors will give astronomers four times the light-gathering power of the 200-inch Palomar telescope. More mundanely, LBL's various programs under its applied science division have produced a fistful of innovative ideas for cutting energy usage. These innovations range from compact fluorescent light sources and low heat-loss windows to a computer program that helps architects design more energy-efficient buildings. One of the more successful of these groups is the center for building science, which is directed by physicist Arthur H. Rosenfeld. Though he came to Berkeley in the 1950s as Enrico Fermi's last graduate student, Rosenfeld now considers himself an evangelist for energy efficiency. He notes, for example, that the architectural computer program alone has probably led to a global fuel savings of $3 billion a year. Watching these changes, some observers wonder whether LBL will ever regain its once-dominant place as a laboratory for basic investigations into the secrets of matter. That was in an era when the question of whether this work had any immediate practical applications was rarely asked. Seaborg, who remains an associate director at large, takes comfort in the fact that LBL physicists will still pursue their craft, although at other sites. One such place is rival Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island, N.Y., which recently won a competition to build a powerful new accelerator called RHIC (for Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider). But he remains uneasy about the lack of a major accelerator on campus. LBL needs activity here to be in the forefront, to remain first class," says Seaborg. Otherwise, he says, the laboratory will be indistinguishable from any other university or laboratory in the country. Certainly, as LBL's scientific agenda changes, it is losing some of its glamour. As Rosenfeld puts it, You can't go to the cafeteria anymore and see seven Nobel Prize winners." But, he adds, science must change with the times. And he thinks that the changes have been necessary. Muller is more positive. It's still the most dynamic lab in the United States," he insists. As an example, he cites the last important work of his mentor, Luis Alvarez, which linked a geological curiosity, a 65-million-year-old worldwide layer of iridium, and the extinction of the dinosaurs. As Alvarez saw it, the iridium came from an asteroid, which raised such a large cloud of dust when it struck the earth that it caused worldwide cooling and the demise of the large reptiles. But before he could be sure, he needed a very careful chemical analysis. And LBL was one of the few places that could do the job. Says Muller, Where in the United States could you walk across the parking lot and find someone who could make the most precise iridium measurements in the world?" Frederic Golden is a science writer based in San Francisco.

Lawrence Berkeley Lab Expects Gain From Applied Research, Industry Ties

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