Claire Max
Livermore's New Ideas Lab Focuses on Innovation
December 2004 / January 2005
Volume 2 Number 6
When Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was established in 1952, its first director, Herbert F. York, and his team of young scientists set out to make Livermore a "new ideas" laboratory. Their going-in goal was to advance the nation's nuclear weapons program through creative science and technology.
Accordingly, one of the laboratory's first and most important innovations was the development of a megaton-class warhead that could be launched from a submarine —€”a project that led to the Polaris missile system, a staple of the U.S. nuclear deterrent since the early 1960s.
In the decades since, Livermore has gone on to build the world's most powerful lasers, initiate the research that led to the landmark Human Genome Project, pioneer the development and use of supercomputers, and create hundreds of groundbreaking technologies that enhance the nation's health, quality of life and economic well-being.
One of the best-known scientists epitomizing Livermore's ongoing commitment to innovation is physicist Dick Post, a key member of Herb York's original team who continues to pursue new ideas several days a week at the laboratory, even though he "retired" in 1992.
Post, 85, the subject of a profile in TechComm (Vol. 2, No. 3), began his career as a pioneering theorist and researcher in the field of magnetic fusion, which he still works on today. Post's expertise in electromagnetism and his thirst for finding new and better ways to get things done has resulted in more than 30 patents for such devices as nearly frictionless magnetic bearings, advanced flywheels and electromechanical batteries that can store energy much more efficiently than conventional electrochemical batteries.
These days, Post works at the cutting edge of magnetic levitation technology.
His simple and efficient method for using permanent magnets to levitate the trains in a mass transit system, licensed by General Atomics of San Diego using the trade name Inductrack, won a 2004 R&D 100 Award from R&D Magazine. Livermore earned five of the prestigious awards this year, bringing the laboratory's cumulative total to 102 awards since the program was established in1963.
The Inductrack system uses permanent magnets to produce the magnetic fields that levitate the train, providing economic and operational advantages over other maglev systems. It can be adapted to both high-speed and urban-speed environments. In the event of a power failure, the train slows gradually until it comes to rest on its auxiliary wheels.
At the other end of the age spectrum from Post is biologist Allen Christian, 37, deputy division leader of the Defense Division in the laboratory's Biology and Biotechnology Research Program. Christian is rapidly making a name for himself as one of Livermore's most creative young researchers. Christian and his self-styled team of "problem solvers" have won three R&D 100 awards in the last six years for their pioneering research on locating damaged DNA within a cell, finding and determining the function of genes, and developing a new method for "silencing," or turning off, specific genes.
Livermore's novel technique for silencing genes uses "hybrid" molecules that combine short, complementary strands of DNA and RNA (ribonucleic acid), called siHybrids, to turn off a chosen gene. siHybrids have several advantages over the currently used gene-silencing technology called siRNA (short interfering RNA): They can be delivered into cells without disrupting or damaging them, their effects last longer, and they function in bacterial and viral as well as in animal cells.
The siHybrids are inherently more stable than siRNAs. They passively enter cells and remain stable in the presence of the enzymes in a cell. As a result, the hybrid molecules are more robust than siRNA, and their effects last up to 10 times longer. A single cell contains more than six billion nucleotide bases—€”yet siHybrids can locate the one damaged or misplaced gene in a cell and quickly silence it.
"With the siHybrids, researchers and physicians could quickly, inexpensively and precisely shut off a damaged or abnormal gene that is causing a disease, ranging from cancer to bacterial or viral infection," says Christian.
Providing Support for Innovation
The kind of groundbreaking science and engineering carried out by researchers like Dick Post and Allen Christian doesn't come by accident.
In the world of Big Science at the national laboratories, innovation is a high-risk pursuit that requires both moral and financial support. Post's work on Inductrack and Christian's on gene silencing, were launched with funding from Livermore's Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program, which invests up to 6 percent of the laboratory's annual budget in innovative science and engineering projects.
LDRD-funded projects typically account for 40 to 50 percent of Livermore's patents, more than 25 percent of its publications, and 40 percent of its R&D 100 awards.
"The ability to invest in the laboratory's future by funding innovative, high-risk, high-potential payoff research and development in pursuit of laboratory missions gives us independence, flexibility and technical vitality," says Rokaya Al-Ayat, Livermore's acting deputy director for science and technology. "These investments help attract and engage our most talented researchers and foster collaborations with universities other laboratories, and industry."
Here are just a few of the many other Livermore researchers who have made innovative contributions to their fields, often with the initial support of LDRD funding:
Precise Targeting of Cancer Tumors
Christine Hartmann-Siantar, a medical physicist who directs Livermore's Glenn T. Seaborg Institute for Transactinium Science, founded a new cancer treatment named Peregrine that helps doctors direct the appropriate amount of radiation at tumors with minimal damage to surrounding healthy tissue.
The treatment calculates the actual dose of radiation by modeling how the radiation is created in a medical accelerator and how it interacts with various tissues and materials in the patient's body. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the commercial use of Peregrine to treat cancer patients in September 2000 and the laboratory has since partnered with NOMOS Radiation Oncology Division of North American Scientific Inc., to distribute the technology to a number of hospitals for testing and validation.
Sparking a Revolution in Astronomy
Claire Max, a longtime astrophysicist at Livermore and recently also a faculty member at the University of California at Santa Cruz, is a central figure in the field of adaptive optics (AO) for ground-based telescopes. Max is a member of the lab's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and was its founding director back in the early 1980s. She currently divides her time between the institute and UC Santa Cruz, where she is a professor and deputy director of the Center for Adaptive Optics.
Throughout her career, Max has made important contributions to the separate fields of plasma physics and astrophysics. Her work on laser guide stars, which are used with AO to correct the blurring of telescopic imagery caused by turbulence in the atmosphere, has pushed forward an ongoing revolution in ground-based astronomy.
Max is a co-inventor of the sodium laser guide star for astronomy, and she is a leader in implementing these new artificial guide stars at astronomical observatories. Today ground-based telescopes, using AO systems driven by laser guide stars, are delivering high-resolution infrared images that rival, or in some cases even exceed, the sharpness of the infrared cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope.
Taking Radiation Detection to the Field
Mike Dunning, a physicist working to counter nuclear terrorism in Livermore's Defense and Nuclear Technologies program, led the program that developed RadScout, a breakthrough in radiation detection and identification technology.
RadScout reduces existing bulky detection equipment to a compact, lightweight, battery-powered device that can be permanently mounted or fully portable and can be operated by workers or first responders with minimal training. Weighing less than 25 pounds, RadScout features a miniaturized refrigeration system cooling to -280°F that eliminates liquid nitrogen cooling for the device's germanium crystal.
Advanced Measurement Technology's ORTEC Products has licensed the technology and made it commercially available in its "Detective" series.
Driven to Improve Vehicle Technology
Mechanical engineer Salvador Aceves, associate program leader for energy efficiency and renewable energy in Livermore's Energy and Environment Directorate, heads up several research programs aimed at improving vehicle engine design and fuel storage technology. His current focus is on overcoming one of the major barriers to practical hydrogen-fueled vehicles: onboard storage.
Hydrogen-powered vehicles are more efficient and cleaner than gasoline or diesel vehicles. In addition, production of hydrogen from carbon-free sources (such as nuclear or renewable energy) is the most efficient and economical way to achieve deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions.
Aceves and his team have developed and tested a safe, compact hydrogen storage tank that combines the around-town energy efficiency of conventional compressed hydrogen gas with the long-distance driving range of cryogenic (low-temperature) compressed gaseous and liquid hydrogen.
"The energy system as it is now is very nice," Aceves says. "We basically have an unlimited supply of energy at a very low cost to satisfy all our transportation, industrial, and residential needs.
"But there are also many problems related to our use of energy," he says. "Environmental pollution, dependence on foreign oil and global warming (primarily caused by carbon dioxide emissions) are very serious problems. We may not be able to completely solve them in the short term, but at least we can reduce them to where they cause the least possible damage."
—€˜Killer Micros' Revolutionize Supercomputing
When physicist Eugene Brooks came to Livermore from Caltech in 1983, computer scientists were starting to look for new ways to boost the processing power of supercomputers beyond the capabilities of the mainframe computers then in use. Brooks put Caltech's early work on parallel processing to work in an LDRD-funded Massively Parallel Computing Initiative, a radical notion in the computing community at the time.
"We were heretics," Brooks recalls. "They used to laugh us out of talks."
For three years, Brooks and his fellow researchers worked on massively parallel computing systems at Livermore and remotely on machines at Caltech and other DOE institutions. They became convinced that the future of high-performance computing lay not in traditional mainframe technology, which relied on a small number of large, centralized processing units, but instead in many microprocessors working in parallel. Brooks dubbed it "the attack of the killer micros."
Livermore's LDRD strategic initiative led to the broad use of parallel computing in the Laboratory's weapons program and in energy research, and it paved the way for the development of the world's fastest supercomputers—€”the massively parallel machines that are now a cornerstone of DOE's Advanced Simulation and Computing program.
Charles Osolin a public information officer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
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