Research to Reality

By Amy Mason Doan
Photographs by LeRoy N. Sanchez/
Los Alamos National Laboratory

In hospitals, doctors will soon be able to test for early lung cancer by examining bronchial fluid under fluorescent light. At your local airport, security may use magnetic signatures from a mini-MRI device to identify, at the molecular level, any dangerous liquids. Under the Gulf of Mexico, a new polymer that doesn’t expand when heated could prevent oil-well ruptures. And one planet over, a new Mars Rover laser telescope may vaporize pebbles to study their composition.

These are just a few innovations hatched from the Department of Energy’s national labs at Los Alamos in New Mexico and Livermore in California. Los Alamos National Laboratory was created in 1943 to develop the atomic bomb; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was established in 1952 to advance nuclear science. Ensuring that the country’s nuclear weapons are safe, secure, and reliable remains a top priority. But today the labs’ work also spans the scientific alphabet from astrophysics to zoology.

The University of California managed both sites on its own from their inception until recently, when DOE sought new management contracts. In June 2006, a consortium including Bechtel began operating Los Alamos. In October 2007, another Bechtel consortium started operating Lawrence Livermore.

“Los Alamos and Livermore are two of the world’s most diverse scientific institutions,” says Jan Van Prooyen, Bechtel senior vice president and Los Alamos National Laboratory deputy director. “Our fundamental job is to focus each lab’s efforts on the most meaningful science and technology while supporting those efforts with world-class safety and security programs and maximizing the laboratories’ outputs.”

Van Prooyen notes that Bechtel employees now working at the labs have brought best practices from the company’s projects and programs the world over, “and we’re very proud to be a part of the United States’ premier national security science laboratories.”

UC is a major part of each consortium, and the motto of “science in the public interest” hasn’t changed. The partnerships are boosting that goal by making the labs more efficient and focused as businesses. While much remains classified, these days there is a stronger emphasis on spinning research out of the lab and into daily life.

“We’re thinking of intellectual property applications at the beginning of the process, rather than the end,” says Duncan McBranch, who oversees science, technology, and engineering at Los Alamos. “Our goal is to not just deliver science, but to deliver science that yields solutions.”

The lab’s Technology Transfer Division is charged with bridging the gap between the worlds of science and business. That includes ensuring that inventions are patented, managing joint lab-industry research partnerships, and playing a translating role between laboratory and corporate cultures. The group hires interns from MBA programs, including Wharton and MIT, who are encouraged to mine the lab’s research for commercial potential. Close to 1,300 unclassified patents have been issued since Los Alamos was formed, and more than 200 new invention disclosures have been developed since the arrival of the new management team. The lab increasingly partners with companies to develop products that will benefit the United States.

“We look for unclassified variations of classified research more than we used to,” says McBranch. “It’s an idea that’s really caught fire within the organization.”
A well-publicized recent example is the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project, or those famous bomb-sniffing bees. To train honeybees as a miniature security force, Los Alamos researchers gave them a sniff of certain chemicals, then followed up with a reward of sugar water. Over time, the bees begin to stick out their nectar-slurping tongues when they were near plastic explosives and other dangerous substances. The bees have an edge over dogs in many situations, due to their size and portability. Los Alamos scientists are now working on handheld containers to transport the bees.

The labs also are making advances in alternative energy. Experience with underground nuclear tests (which are no longer conducted in the United States) yielded specialized modeling and monitoring programs. They are ideally suited to help in shale oil recovery, a process in which the solid hydrocarbons in rocks are heated and the resulting oil and gas are used as fuel.

More than 60 percent of the world’s known shale oil reserves are in the United States, but the standard technique of bringing the shale up to the surface and then extracting its oil has not resulted in a viable large-scale alternative to conventional methods. So Los Alamos is partnering with Chevron Energy Technology Co. on techniques for environmentally clean in situ shale oil extraction, which liquefies the shale’s oil beneath the surface, rather than above it.

Also in the energy department, Los Alamos scientists have made significant advances on a new kind of solar cell that would use miniscule semiconductors called quantum dots to convert the sun’s energy to electricity. Commercialization is still beyond the horizon, but the invention is an exciting first demonstration of a way to get more than one electron from each incoming photon of light, a phenomenon called carrier multiplication. This process offers a means to improve the performance of solar cells.

In 2002, Los Alamos launched a Technology Maturation Fund for technologies like the quantum dot project, which are perceived to have high but unproven commercial potential. The goal is to nudge innovations forward to a point where companies will license them or they will receive startup venture backing. The dollars are modest, but they’ve proven an enormous help in moving new technologies from the lab to the market.

So far, the fund has given 24 awards, from $10,000 to $50,000, to lab inventors. The money differs from other laboratory grants because it is tied not to a time period, but to the production of a prototype, computer code, or other deliverable. Scientists have used the money to develop auto-darkening car mirrors, a technique for removing nitrate pollutants from water, and micro-X-ray fluorescence for examining drug interactions.

Less than two years into the contract at Los Alamos, the new management and operating partnership has made strides behind the scenes, maintaining its mission while absorbing increased costs without a budget increase. The facility has improved employee retention, reduced its contractor staff, and become more efficient using tools such as Six Sigma. Huge amounts of classified material have been eliminated, and communication processes have been reexamined, resulting in better security for facilities and networks.

Lawrence Livermore has only recently entered its new stage as a business entity, but it met every milestone on the way to the official transition last October from UC to the new consortium. Lawrence Livermore has been noted in particular for its work with radiation detection and supercomputer simulations. Its Blue Gene/L supercomputer is currently the fastest on the planet, with a top speed of 280 teraflops and 3 trillion calculations each second. Its scientists are pioneers in the fields of lasers, bio­fuels, and cancer detection, to name just a few.

Livermore is Los Alamos’ sister laboratory, meaning that the two facilities engage in a continual process of scientific peer review to keep each other sharp. “There’s always been a spirit of healthy competition,” says Lynda Seaver, spokesperson for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

That attitude will keep the labs ahead of the curve in science and business.

Back to top