State of the Laboratory -- 2001

Delivered June 28, 2001, by Argonne Director Hermann A. Grunder.

Argonne Director Hermann A. Grunder

I'm very delighted to be here.

It's obviously with some trepidation that a laboratory director gives a report about the status of a laboratory as wonderful and as big as Argonne, because I can guarantee you that at the end of my talk some of you will be disappointed or angry that I forgot to mention your specific piece of work, which is undoubtedly outstanding. And don't ascribe this all to lack of time. Also, ascribe it to ignorance.

Well, I want to do my best, and I want to communicate to you how I see the laboratory now and probably equally important, how I'm seeing the laboratory in the future.

You know very well that we are part of an international research establishment. There is a community of researchers who have chosen a path for their careers that gets them in contact with the frontier. The first contact you make with this frontier is either in your Ph.D. work or as you join a laboratory or another research institution — at a university or in industry.

You next need to recognize, if you are at Argonne National Laboratory, that we are part of the DOE national laboratory system. You've heard me say before, and perhaps just by repetition you'll start to believe it: There is a national laboratory system, and it is more than the sum of its parts. I firmly believe in that, and there is an opportunity with universities, with industry, with the other national laboratories to strengthen the quality of good research for our nation.

The uniqueness of national labs, and of Argonne National Laboratory, is, of course, our ability to tackle large, complex problems with multidisciplinary teams; problems that the nation considers priorities.

It's very important to understand that our sponsor, the DOE, is a mission agency. And while you have your own particular research priority, which you should have and which you should defend, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is the research priority of the entire nation. But it is fair, and it is proper, and it is essential, that you fight for and communicate where you think is the research frontier - the most important research frontier. And so you see, we have this wonderful creative tension between the individual, the laboratory, and the research establishment as a whole.

Individuals working collaboratively with their teams, with the resources we can make available to them, are, of course, the most important unit in our research enterprise. These teams we integrate, then, within a division, and these divisions we aggregate into ALDships, and that's the way we choose to run the laboratory.

It is very important — and why I feel this opportunity of talking to all of you is so important — that you look at the laboratory as a whole. I hope you will wonder what's going on in other parts. I hope you do that also on your free time, on Saturdays and Sundays as you walk the dog.

The DOE national laboratory system has chosen to organize itself in what is known as government-owned, contractor-operated units. Our contractor is the University of Chicago. This is an extraordinarily fortuitous circumstance because, with its 17 Nobel Prizes, it's certainly an organization of intellectually high standing. It's certainly an organization that makes it that much easier for us to set our sights high. And it is certainly worthwhile to collaborate with the university to reach the most esoteric and the most ambitious goals we can set for ourselves.

In my book, that is one of the real assets. I'll show you why. In the more than 55 years since Argonne's inception, the University of Chicago has been the contractor. Please remember: There's no real reason, except intellectual resources, for the University of Chicago to be engaged with us. There is no profit margin, there is no ulterior motive. Its purpose is to make a contribution; to strengthen itself through this collaboration to serve the research establishment and, therefore, the nation.

I'm very, very thankful to you individual researchers and your predecessors for having brought this laboratory, over its 55 years, to such a wonderful state of blossom. This is remarkable. For more than half a century, you have been able to keep Argonne at the frontier. And so, today, our vision can't be any less than to keep Argonne there and, in the context of continued improvement, to try to move ahead, to find where the research opportunities lie in the future.

I'm also very thankful to the University of Chicago for having taken the task. It isn't always easy to be a diverse group of people in a not-always-easy environment. I'm thankful to the Department of Energy, too, for the way Argonne has blossomed. In any year we might complain that we could use a little bit more money, but over the past 55 years, the Department of Energy and its predecessor agencies have given us what we need to go ahead.

Particular note and particular credit go to Argonne West. Its people have outstanding research results even though over the last decade or two - Yoon (Chang, ALD, Engineering Research) tells me 25 years - life hasn't been easy for nuclear energy. And yet, that group has been able to perform admirably. There are many other examples at the laboratory where people have performed under adverse conditions.

It is that environment of dedication that I feel is my highest obligation to maintain and to enhance wherever I can. If we aren't excellent, we aren't worth having. We are publicly funded. We must earn the trust of the public, of our sponsors. Who are our sponsors? Who are our customers?

Our customers are obviously the sponsors, the people with the money. And besides our federal sponsor, this laboratory has wonderful sponsors in the State of Illinois and its people. It is wonderful to have industry - industrial leaders - supporting Argonne in its quest to get some state support which, of course, we are smart enough to leverage with the federal government. That's the way the game is played. So thanks to the State of Illinois. Thanks to the people who have this foresight, because ultimately, it is a sound investment. Because a flourishing Argonne will bring resources — physical and educational — back to the state.

And our customers are obviously the regulators, the people who tell us not to defraud the government and not to mess up the environment.

And our customers are the public at large, including, of course, the public's representatives in the U.S. Congress.

This lab has done an outstanding job with its neighbors. Argonne is held in high esteem in the Chicago area, in the local area, in DuPage County, and that is not by accident. That is a conscious effort. And we need to give thanks to the Department of Energy in that context, which has helped us to get this relationship with the public going.

And I need to stop here for a short moment and say we mustn't forget that we also have the obligation to educate and train the next generations of scientists, engineers and technicians. This is sometimes tough in a time of financial shortages, but it is in the long run, absolutely essential. And therefore, let's get going on developing the next generation of scientists, engineers and technicians.

I haven't mentioned an aspect of Argonne National Laboratory which is so important. And that is that many divisions are doing fundamental work for which the customer, quite often, is actually Argonne itself. One example is certainly Chemistry. Besides the outstanding chemistry they are doing in the traditional way, they are helping our environmental program by studying how soot is formed from particulate matter in the air, and I am very thankful we are understanding the chemistry active in the atmosphere.

A State of the Lab address wouldn't be complete if I didn't remind you that excellence in integrated safety and security management is a must. It's the entrance price to participate in a publicly sponsored research enterprise. I can report to you that we're not in bad shape. Not in bad shape at all. But there is room for improvement. And you know that.

The cornerstone of these activities is that the line, starting with me, takes responsibility, and that every individual understands that he or she has the authority and the obligation not to go ahead unless a project is safe, environmentally sound and secure. Similarly, every individual who is connected to our computer network is responsible for its security, and must be aware of dangers that exist. We have spent time together discussing this, but I wanted to mention it. Your role is to help in maintaining excellence in these areas.

The next point I want to address is our user facilities. You know, Argonne is blessed with four major user facilities: the APS (Advanced Photon Source), ATLAS (Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System), the IPNS (Intense Pulsed Neutron Source) and the Electron Microscopy center. There are many more facilities that are used by outside users, but you probably would agree with me that these four are very significant.

What is a source of pride to me, and I hope to you, is that not only does each of these user facilities run well, the research done at them is typically pacesetting for their entire fields.

Therefore, it is not surprising that some wonderful results at the APS with respect to fourth generation light sources and other research areas are really showing the way the field is going. And the biology component at the APS, as you well know, is becoming so incredibly important that we really need to look at how we are going to share the cost for the operation of such a facility.

This includes structural biology, like recent work determining a complex protein structure in only six-and-a-half hours. And obtaining the highest resolution picture to date showing how the ribosome allows accurate translation of the genetic code into the proteins that make up organisms. You know these will set the trend to rapid acquisition of the proteins available in nature, which will have an enormous impact on pharmacology, and on design and application of drugs in the future.

And, obviously, discussion of the APS wouldn't be complete without mentioning another wonderful initiative: Nanoscience and nanotechnology. This scale combines chemistry, physics and biology with materials science. They all become the same. This is one of the very exciting activities of the next few decades. We have encountered some difficulties in defining our initial research programs for our Nanotechnology Center. The DOE reviewers weren't totally satisfied, and that may give us a slight delay in funding. On the other hand, we will be funded for one of the most important aspects of the nanoscience initiative — the NanoCAT.

So, this looks good.

On ATLAS: You very well understand the wonderful work there. Like recent research on the abundance of argon-39, measuring concentrations on the order of ten to the minus sixteen, as a tracer for studying flows in ocean currents for environmental purposes. That machine, and the wonderful technology Argonne has developed, is the basis for the Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA), which, together with Michigan State, we hope to propose to the Department of Energy. We hope to submit a proposal which just can't be refused.

Next, I need to congratulate the IPNS for its 20th anniversary. And I would like to add a little bit of a personal story. I was on one of the early review committees when (Don) Stevens was still in the Department of Energy (Basic Energy Sciences). And we sort of shook our heads. We were wondering whether Argonne could pull it together out of many a used part to make one of the most outstanding neutron sources in the world.

That is an accomplishment I personally have seen from the very beginning, and I really would like to congratulate the team. National events helped. Failure of the Advanced Neutron Source as a reactor and delays in the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) mean the IPNS is for the next decade the workhorse for neutron scattering.

And not only is it the workhorse, it also has taken on the obligation of developing and looking at the most effective instrumentation for the SNS, and on top of it they have to educate several thousand neutron scatterers of the next generation. The neutron scattering field has atrophied and we are down around 800 people, and the Spallation Neutron Source is being designed for 3,000 neutron scatterers. It is a very important field, neutron scattering. And looking back on it, one wonders what happened in this neck of the woods. Where was the community that should have pulled this together? But IPNS is the facility that could. Congratulations! And it's so fitting that you are celebrating your 20th anniversary.

I know relatively little about the Electron Microscopy Center, but I know that it has specialized in in situ studies of defect processes and phase transformations. I have been invited to learn more by its leaders, and I will promise you that at our next event I will report to you more knowledgeably. But it is one of the important instruments which is supporting our nanoscience and nanotechnology initiative in the analysis of results.

I would be incomplete, very incomplete, if I didn't elaborate on the wonderful efforts at Argonne-West and Argonne-East in nuclear energy. It is - from a technical point of view — simply amazing what this group has done and is doing and will do in the future in finding the niche which covers the major questions nuclear power has raised. Of course, right now, waste is standing on top of all people's concerns. You hear more and more people saying, "without a solution for waste, nuclear energy isn't going anywhere."

The electrometallurgical treatment of metal fuel reduces the toxicity of the waste by a factor of 10,000. This gives the waste a ceramic or metallic form, which is easy to put in geological storage. Pyroprocessing, or electrometallurgical technological processing, is also extracting 100 times more energy from our existing uranium resource. And on top of it, it's proliferation-proof to the extent man can make something proliferation-proof.

This is based on the wonderful work we have done with EBR-II, and Argonne National Laboratory is poised to demonstrate the fuel cycle, the economic viability, the processing, including the actinides, in the next step. Publicly it's probably going to be called the Advanced Fast Reactor. Among ourselves we can call it "EBR-III." Congratulations to that group! A fair fraction of my time I want to spend on nuclear power, nuclear energy, because I think Argonne has something very, very special to offer.

Let me tell you that another thing that is very, very impressive at Argonne is how the transportation group has used existing ANL facilities to make real contributions to the transportation problem of the 20th and 21st centuries and is poised to do more. Harvey Drucker and his colleagues have a wonderful story, and a challenge there is to be outstanding in the research, to be relevant in applied physics, and to be useful to industry. It's a daunting challenge and I'm sure glad I don't have to do it.

In the same way, decision information science is an area I am just barely starting to understand. In my book, this is one of the most creative teams we have: Using, by-and-large, existing technology, but trying to combine it in codes and thinking which is applicable to so many of the nation's problems.

Next, I would be untrue to my past if I wouldn't say how enchanted I am that High Energy Physics is involved both with Fermilab in the large detector for neutrino oscillation detection, which, by the way, have now been discovered and need to be confirmed, and with the Large Hadron Collider, collaborating on the ATLAS detector — not to be confused with our accelerator. And as an accelerator physicist I have to tell you that the high-gradient-dielectric-supported acceleration method which is called Wakefield is a long shot, but it would change the picture of high energy physics if it should succeed. So it has my full support.

Another particular pleasure to me is that the Department of the Interior chose Argonne to do the incredibly scrutinized job of renewing the environmental impact statement for the Alaskan Pipeline. It is high risk and high profile. Good luck, and if you need me, call on me.

I have shortchanged biology and bioscience, with only a mention of their relationship to the APS. But they have made real strides, recently demonstrating that a single short protein fragment has the potential to block a critical protein aggregation step in three currently virtually untreatable diseases. Alzheimer's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, and primary amyloidosis. This is very important. It's also very promising for Parkinson's Disease, Huntington's Disease, and adult onset diabetes. I'm not an expert on this, but the gist of it is that our research is relevant to human diseases, and Bioscience's collaboration with the Pathology Department of the University of Chicago is very, very fitting. So congratulations to that effort. And as you should know, we are striving to make biology a larger part of our R&D portfolio.

Now, one last area and then we conclude: Computing. High-end computing will clearly change the way we do research, as we saw when we had a talk very recently by the deputy director from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Bill Press, on what is a good simulation.

We have an outstanding Math and Computer Sciences Division. And I have started to understand that these outstanding researchers, of course, need to have their own research objective in computer science and computation science, but they also need to help others across the laboratory to see where computing needs to go in the next ten years. We need the leadership of the computing science people who know what's possible, and then we need — across the laboratory — to develop a plan.

This is a mouthful and this is expensive. Other national laboratories have budgeted $40 million per year over the next ten years. I believe it isn't quite that expensive, or so I'm led to believe, but we need to know where we want to be, and then we need to work across divisions on how to get from here to there. It doesn't take much argument to convince you that at the price tag and the complexity, we will not have several such advanced devices. I hope we can afford one, and therefore we have to see how this is serving the divisions.

I look forward to a very intense collaboration with the University of Chicago. In fact, we're talking about an essentially combined effort in this area.

As you will notice, this isn't yet a plan. This is a vision. But it clearly has two parts: Knowing where you go and then knowing how to get there.

To do all this, we clearly need an administrative structure that is effective, and one of the best ways of keeping informed is to participate in the review process. Namely, you do want informed management. I hope you want me to understand what you are doing, and I'll want the same. And in order to do that, I either need to clone myself or, more practical, I needed to hire a deputy in addition to the deputy to the director the laboratory has had for a long time, and in addition to the chief operating officer. So I would like to introduce to you Dr. Beverly Hartline as deputy director, Don Joyce as deputy to the director and Rudy Bouie as the chief operating officer.

In addition to that, the front office needs to work very smoothly, and all of you who know Kay Winner know she's a winner. We finally converted her to my working with a calendar visible — not on the computer, just visible on the wall.

Also I would like to acknowledge the wonderful help I'm getting from Liz Stefanski, who's assistant to me, and the auditing department, Len (Novotny), and of course, the ALDs, with whom we can knock heads on the important issues for the departments and who keep me on the straight and narrow. I also want to mention Mark Jones. Obviously you need, in this time and age, to be working very closely with your lawyer or you end up in jail.

There are obviously many, many more people who deserve acknowledgment here, and forgive me for not mentioning all those. They are not only in my thoughts. They are also in my prayers that they remain healthy and ready and willing to serve Argonne.

As a result of our wonderful activities, Argonne has a myriad of awards and patents too long to repeat here. But I must say, I was impressed and loaded down when we made presentations a couple of weeks ago. We have individuals who have five patents in two years. This is really impressive, and if you have to hand them out, the stack's like that. That's just one measure of the excellence of individual researchers and workers at Argonne National Laboratory. There are many more awards, and we will hand out another series of awards in just a few minutes if I finally come to the end of my talk, but there is so much to say.

Let me recognize one award, which is particularly nice: The Closing the Circle Award for excellence in environmental stewardship through pollution prevention. Part of this is using in procurement and in construction of a new building as much recycled material as you can. Argonne has won it two years in a row, and what is wonderful is it's given out by the White House. Congratulations to those people who have done that work.

So, to summarize: Nanoscience, RIA, nuclear energy, biosciences, advanced computing, and transportation are our initiatives. As you know, Beverly Hartline is running the institutional planning efforts to put that together.

Again, the management is re-formed. Look. Any human being has a finite capacity to understand, but eventually I will understand what it is you are actually doing, and then, informed, I can support you.

And so I want to end on a personal note. It's a privilege for me to serve at Argonne National Laboratory. And as you heard me say before, the association of Argonne with the University of Chicago is simply a winner. That is the right combination as we have demonstrated for more than half a century!

I feel personally very gratified that I can work for all of you, because I want Argonne to be counted if not the best, then one of the best national laboratories and to continue to be an asset not only locally and regionally, but nationally.

Thank you.