Accomplishments
and Awards
BASIC
RESEARCH WITH HISTORIC RESULTS
The Office of Science maintains
our Nation’s scientific infrastructure
and ensures U.S. world leadership across a broad
range of scientific disciplines. It supports
research and development programs enabling the
Department of Energy to accomplish its missions
in energy security, national security, environmental
restoration, and science.
Office of Science research investments
have yielded a wealth of dividends, including
significant technological innovations, medical
and health advances, new intellectual capital,
enhanced economic competitiveness, and improved
quality of life for the American people.
Research supported by the Office
of Science has made major contributions to development
of the Internet; magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) and medical isotopes; composite materials
used in military hardware and motor vehicles;
and x-ray diagnostics of computer chips and
other high-tech materials.
Office of Science research investments
also have led to such innovations as the Nobel
Prize-winning discovery of new forms of carbon,
non-invasive detection of cancers and other
diseases, improved computer models for understanding
global climate change, and new insights on the
fundamental nature of matter and energy.
Research sponsored by the Office
of Science has produced many key scientific breakthroughs
and contributed to this Nation’s well-being:
Enabling World-Class
R&D
Helping to Develop the Internet
Computing for Science’s
Sake
Improving the Science of
Climate Change Research
Pioneering the Human Genome
Project
Enhancing National Security
Improving Energy Security
Advancing Nuclear Medicine
Detecting and Diagnosing Medical Conditions
Treating Blindness - and
Other Neurological Disorders
Expanding the Frontiers
of Discovery
·
Enabling World-Class
R&D
Throughout its history, the Office
of Science Development has designed, constructed
and operated many of the most advanced research
and development facilities in the world, which
keep the U.S. in the forefront of scientific
discovery and technological innovation.
These include neutron scattering
facilities, synchrotron radiation light sources,
the superconducting Tevatron high-energy particle
accelerator, the world’s first linear
collider, the continuous electron beam accelerator,
the relativistic heavy ion collider (the highest-energy
“atom smasher” in the world) and
a Tokamak fusion test reactor.
·
Helping to Develop the
Internet
The Office of Science helped develop
the Internet.
In 1974, the Office of Science
first connected its geographically dispersed
researchers through a single network, a revolutionary,
cost-effective mechanism that provided supercomputing
power to civilian researchers and established
a network model adopted by other Federal government
agencies and states for their researchers.
Later, the Office of Science collaborated
with DARPA, NSF and NASA to transform the many
independent networks of the 1980s into a single
integrated communications network that was the
basis for today’s commercial Internet.
More recently, the Office of Science
created the multicast backbone (M-Bone), the
Internet videoconferencing virtual network that
launched a new era in scientific collaboration
in the early 1990s by linking anyone with a
workstation with audiovisual capabilities and
a high-speed connection to the Internet.
·
Computing for Science’s
Sake
The Office of Science long has
been respected as the world leader in developing
and using advanced computers as tools for scientific
discovery and to achieve breakthroughs in targeted
applications disciplines.
It pioneered the transition to
massively parallel supercomputing (involving
1,000 or more processors), producing the software,
scalable operating systems and other technologies
needed and demonstrating its value in fields
ranging from seismic imaging to materials modeling
The Office of Science also installed
the first supercomputer available to the civilian
research community that broke the peak performance
barrier of 1 teraflop – or a trillion
operations per second – and developed
the first civilian scientific application to
achieve actual performance over 1 teraflop.
· Improving
the Science of Climate Change Research
The Office of Science initiated
the Climate Change Research Program in 1978
to evaluate the environmental and health consequences
of long-term energy solutions. This was the
first research program in the U.S. to investigate
the effect of energy-related emissions of greenhouse
gases, especially carbon dioxide, on climate
and the environment.
The Office of Science also has
developed software and computer systems to model
and simulate environmental conditions and project
climate change under varying emissions scenarios.
The Office of Science’s
climate change research program is the third
largest in the U.S. – and the only one
that is focused specifically on improving the
scientific basis to understand, predict, and
assess the effect of energy-related emissions
on climate and the environment.
· Pioneering
the Human Genome Project
The Office of Science initiated
the Human Genome Project in 1986.
It also developed DNA sequencing
and computational technologies that made possible
the unraveling of the human genetic code and
published a complete draft of the DNA sequence
of the human genome in 2001.
This historic undertaking to discover
the genetic blueprint of human beings will enable
scientists to identify more genes responsible
for diseases and develop new diagnostic and
treatment possibilities.
Now the Office of Science is harnessing
the biotechnology revolution to develop clean
energy and repair damage to our environment
through the Genomes to Life Initiative.
· Enhancing
National Security
The Office of Science has funded
research leading to technologies that make our
lives safer in many ways. These include:
* neutron detectors that can
identify concealed nuclear weapons and land
mines and are used for arms control and nonproliferation
verification;
* new holographic computerized
imaging technology that identifies hidden
weapons, even non-metallic ones, through the
clothing of airline passengers;
* smoke detectors that sense
smoke by detecting changes in the ionization
of the air; and
* advanced sensors that can
detect explosives, narcotics, and chemical
and biological agents – and many other
innovations that will contribute to homeland
security.
· Improving
Energy Security
The Office of Science has contributed
to improved energy savings through several discoveries,
including:
* lithium batteries that offer
high-energy storage capacity and an environmentally
benign alternative to the harmful lead used
in conventional batteries;
* new and improved metals, plastics
and other composite materials used in military
hardware and motor vehicles; and
* superconducting wires that
can lead to more efficient types of power
generation, transmission, and electrical devices
– and thereby save energy and reduce
emissions.
In addition, the Office of Science’s
research into fusion energy is poised to pay
big dividends. Scientists are figuring out the
way the sun and stars produce their energy –
and that can have broad applications for mankind,
since fusion power holds important promise as
a clean, inexhaustible energy source.
· Advancing
Nuclear Medicine
The Office of Science and its
predecessor agencies have been pioneering the
field of nuclear medicine since the 1940's.
Researchers probably never anticipated
when they started smashing atoms and protons
in accelerators that their science - their very
basic research on matter - would eventually
give us remarkable life-saving technology. Yet
thanks to this rich legacy of research, doctors
today rely on nuclear medicine to diagnose,
evaluate and manage many types of disease.
Virtually all hospitals, as well
as many clinics and private doctors' offices,
perform nuclear medicine tests and scans. In
fact, about 13 million nuclear medicine procedures
are performed each year (or 35,000 each day)
on patients here in the U.S.
Nuclear medicine is used to help
patients with heart disease, cancer, lung disease,
abdominal pain and gastrointestinal bleeding,
thyroid disorders, epilepsy, infections and
dementia. It also helps patients at risk of
or recovering from strokes and at risk for stress
fractures.
One of every three hospital patients
in the U.S. benefits from nuclear medicine.
About 10,000 cancer patients are treated every
day with electron beams from linear accelerators.
· Detecting
and Diagnosing Medical
Conditions
Many of medicine's most powerful
diagnostic tools incorporate technology that
physicists originally developed to explore the
fundamental nature of matter. Magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI), for example, is based on the
principles of nuclear magnetic resonance, a
technique used by researchers to obtain chemical
and physical information about molecules.
The Office of Science is responsible
for key advances in MRI, positron emission tomography
(PET), and single-photon emission computed tomography
(SPECT), which permit noninvasive and improved
detection and diagnosis of medical conditions.
With PET and SPECT imaging, scientists
now are making vital contributions to medical
science's understanding of the molecular mechanisms
of disease and the search for new treatments.
Their current medical research priorities include
drug addiction and substance abuse, aging and
degenerative diseases, and the biology of tumors
that may lead to more effective cancer therapies.
· Treating
Blindness - and Other
Neurological Disorders
The Office of Science is now sponsoring
research and development of an artificial retina,
which can restore sight in blind patients with
macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa,
and other eye diseases. The research is being
conducted at the Doheny Eye Institute, University
of Southern California, in collaboration with
North Carolina State University, University
of California - Santa Cruz, Second Sight LLC,
and five DOE national labs - Argonne, Lawrence
Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Sandia.
The artificial retina is a device
that captures visual signals and sends them
to the brain in the form of electrical impulses.
The device is a miniature disc that contains
an array of electrodes that can be implanted
in the back of the eye to replace a damaged
retina. Visual signals are captured by a small
video camera in the eyeglasses of the blind
person and processed through a microcomputer
worn on a belt. The signals are transmitted
to the electrode array in the eye. The array
stimulates optical nerves, which then carry
a signal to the brain.
The technology that is being developed
in the artificial retina project may be applied
not only to the treatment of blindness but in
the general field of neural prostheses. It may
be adapted to help persons with spinal cord
injuries, Parkinson's disease, deafness, and
almost any other neurological disorders.
· Expanding
the Frontiers of Discovery
The Office of Science funded the
research that led to one of the great intellectual
achievements of the 20th century — and
13 Nobel Prizes: the discovery of all but one
(the electron) of the most fundamental constituents
of matter, namely quarks and leptons, which
confirmed the Standard Model – physicists’
current theory of matter and the forces of nature.
The Office of Science supported
the 1996 Nobel Prize-winning discovery of a
new form of carbon, known as “Bucky Ball,”
which is spurring a revolution in carbon chemistry
and may lead to a profusion of new materials,
polymers, catalysts, and drug delivery systems.
Now the Office of Science is underwriting
research to solve the mystery of “dark
energy,” perhaps responsible for the remarkable
recent finding that the expansion of the universe
is accelerating, rather than slowing due to
gravity as expected.
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