A Few Words in Defense of the National Laboratories
Michael Schrage’s “Innovation” column, “Rx for Nation’s Labs: New Role and Less Money” (Feb. 18), in which he argues that national laboratories are devoted to weaponry and unable to serve American industry, misrepresents the facts.
Few of the Department of Energy’s laboratories have been involved in the design or engineering of nuclear weapons.
Brookhaven National Laboratory, for example, which Schrage wrongly characterizes as a weapons lab, was founded after World War II by scientists from nine eastern universities. It was established not to build bombs but to provide research tools like particle accelerators, which were too large for individual institutions to operate, and to make them available to scientists from universities and industry.
Brookhaven has been remarkably successful in this mission. Its facilities have generated many major scientific discoveries and significant industrial applications. Four Nobel Prize-winning experiments and theories have come out of the high-energy physics devices at the laboratory. The national synchrotron light source, one of the most intense sources of X-rays and ultraviolet light in the world, has more than 2,500 users, including scientists and engineers from 70 large and small private corporations. IBM and AT&T; have used the light source to develop X-ray lithography. Exxon and Mobil have studied catalysts. Du Pont has categorized chemical waste. To these industrial users, Brookhaven provides scientific equipment otherwise unavailable.
In response, U.S. industries have voted with their corporate funds: They have placed more than $100 million worth of experimental equipment at the light source for their own development work.
There’s more. Brookhaven scientists got the first patent on the concept of the magnetic levitation of trains. The use of Technetium-99 as a diagnostic tool in medical applications, now a more than a $100-million-a-year industry, came from Brookhaven. The list of these results and of Brookhaven’s facilities is much longer, and I’d be happy to give Mr. Schrage a fuller account.
Other civilian national laboratories of the Energy Department, such as the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, the Argonne National Lab and the Oak Ridge National Lab, have similar stories to tell. We have different missions and more ways of helping U.S. industry than can be understood by a simplistic look at the weapons program.
Brookhaven’s mission has served the country well and needs no major overhaul. Too bad Mr. Schrage didn’t bother to find out.
MARTIN BLUME
Upton, N.Y.
The writer is deputy director of Brookhaven National Laboratory.
