Testimony of Dr. Charles V. Shank Director, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Before the House Science Committee Subcommittee on Energy May 17, 2001

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:

It is my pleasure to be here today to provide testimony on the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. My perspective is as Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1989. We have a rich history of scientific discovery, and I am pleased to address the strengths derived from the Office of Science, the value of federal science investments, and the importance of the physical sciences to our national welfare.

I will begin by talking about the accomplishments of the Office of Science and its contributions to the Nation’s science. I will then highlight the need for increased investment, both in research and in the infrastructure needed to perform that research. Finally, I will discuss ways of increasing the effectiveness of the Office of Science.

Office of Science Record of Accomplishment

The Office of Science deserves to be recognized for its leading role in several of the most advanced scientific breakthroughs of our time. The Office of Science initiated the Human Genome Project, and "Sequenced Genomes,"was named as Science magazine’s "Breakthrough of the Year" for 2000. At the heart of this success were multidisciplinary science, advanced instrumentation, and automation and computing capabilities that are the hallmark of Office of Science programs.

A number of the "Runners-up Breakthroughs" for 2000 were supported by the DOE Office of Science National Laboratories, including x-ray crystallographic techniques that revealed the structure of the ribosome. The ribosome is the cell unit that constructs the proteins that form the genetic code of life. This discovery, which was announced last month, revealed the structure of the ribosome down to every single atom. This is amazing when you consider that it is made of hundreds of thousands of atoms. Also, the Office of Science has been instrumental in revising scientists’ views on the composition of matter and energy in the Universe. These discoveries now point to an unforeseen type of dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the Universe.

These discoveries took place because the Office of Science brings powerful physical, engineering and computing science capabilities to bear on many other fields of science, including the health sciences. Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and former Director of the National Institutes of Health, said in an October 2000 Washington Post article that the physical sciences sponsored by the Office of Science are of critical value. "Medical advances may seem like wizardry. But pull back the curtain, and sitting at the lever is a high-energy physicist, a combinatorial chemist, or an engineer."He also indicated the importance of increasing support to the fundamental science agencies. "This admirable effort should be vigorously supported…to include the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which funds half of all research in the physical sciences and maintains the national laboratories that are essential to biomedicine." The message is clear: the Office of Science is a distinctive and valued science agency that is an essential part of the fabric of American research.

The challenge before the Congress is that the physical sciences threads in the fabric of American research are frayed. While our Nation’s physical sciences research underpins other scientific fields, it has been neglected. For example, while biomedical research has increased about 200 percent in constant dollars since 1990, the Office of Science has only increased 2 percent. I join many other scientists who are greatly concerned about this imbalance. To quote Harold Varmus once again, "The balance of the sciences is essential to the progress in all spheres, including medicine." We should not forget that the vast majority of our economy, including energy, manufacturing, transportation, and the information technologies, are based on the advances of the physical sciences.

Investment in Research Infrastructure

Investments in Office of Science infrastructure and the facilities at the national laboratories must be sustained in order to help maintain our world leadership in science. Each year, more than 22,000 university, government, and industry-sponsored scientists conduct experiments at the facilities operated by the Office of Science. These scientists, including thousands of graduate students, cannot carry on their research without these unique and powerful tools, and the buildings, utilities and support systems essential for laboratories and instruments to function.

At Berkeley Lab, more than 70% of the current government-owned space was constructed before 1970, when the Laboratory was a single-purpose Atomic Energy Commission facility. The average building age is 35 years, and of the 1.7 million square feet of building space, approximately 331,000 square feet of space is in need of replacement.

The Berkeley Lab conditions are not unique. All the civilian multiprogram laboratories comprise more than 16 million square feet of building space. Unfortunately, roughly one-third of the laboratories’ facilities are trailers or other portable or temporary structures. Like Berkeley Lab, the majority of these facilities are old; many were built during or soon after World War II. For the entire DOE complex, approximately 70% of the space is more than 30 years old, and many building and facility infrastructure systems have exceeded their estimated useful life expectancy. The aged conditions of these facilities have adverse implications for the safety, security, cost, and continuity of DOE’s science laboratories.

A new level of investment in Office of Science infrastructure is needed to: (1) accommodate 21st century research needs with the type and quality of space and equipment needed to meet physical sciences research needs; (2) provide a minimum satisfactory working environment for researchers that helps attract and retain high quality staff; (3) provide a safe, healthy, and secure working environment for laboratory employees and visitors, and to assure the protection of the environment of neighboring communities, and (4) enable efficient operations and maintenance, including conditions that promote high productivity and energy efficiency.

The Laboratories and support systems suited to accomplish 21st century research are highly instrumented, clean and controlled, and capable of supporting multidisciplinary research activities, including the interactive efforts of bench science, controlled systems for experiments, and computational modeling as examples. The majority of the current DOE building stock and support facilities is unsuited for current research, and a new level of infrastructure investment is essential to maintaining the outstanding science performed at the multiprogram Office of Science Laboratories.

Increase the Office of Science Budget

The Office of Science provides key scientific and technological capabilities to address the Nation’s large-scale challenges. These include providing the knowledge for clean, affordable, and secure energy, protecting and restoring the environment, ensuring a healthy, secure, and knowledgeable citizenry, and understanding and controlling energy and matter. The Office of Science is targeting priority areas in the coming years including advancing nanoscience; developing more powerful computational models of combustion, climate change, and the subsurface environment; achieving molecular-level understanding of genome functions; controlling microbes for energy and environmental applications; and discovering the underlying properties of matter from high-temperature plasmas to solid state materials to quarks.

Addressing the imbalance in support for the physical sciences, renewing the investments in infrastructure, and serving the larger scientific community will require a dramatic increase in the Office of Science budget over the next 5 years. A funding increase of 15 percent real growth each year would be a wise investment of Federal resources.

D. Allan Bromley, Science and Technology Advisor to former President Bush, stated in a March 9, 2001 New York Times editorial entitled "Science and Surpluses": "The 21st century economy will continue to depend on scientific innovation. Economists estimate that innovation and the application of new technology have generated at least half of the phenomenal growth in America's gross domestic product since World War II.  …;Technological innovation depends upon the steady flow of discoveries and trained workers generated by federal science investments in universities and national laboratories. These discoveries feed directly into the industries that drive the economy. It’s a straightforward relationship: industry is attentive to immediate market pressures, and the federal government makes the investments that ensure long-term competitiveness."

I am especially proud of the remarkable advances on several fronts that highlight the strong relationship between research and our economic future. The Office of Science has been making investments in x-ray optics for several decades, within the Office of Basic Energy Sciences program in developing advanced materials. As part of that effort, Berkeley Lab has developed the most advanced x-ray mirror and optical measuring expertise and instrumentation systems in the world. Our measurement systems, and our Advanced Light Source, have been crucial to the research partnership between the Virtual National Lab (Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Lawrence Berkeley) and industrial research partners (Intel, AMD, Motorola, Micron, Infineon, and IBM). This partnership has successfully developed a prototype tool to pattern microchips with extreme ultraviolet light, whose narrow wavelengths should enable ever-smaller feature sizes. Integrated circuit feature sizes should shrink to 1/1000th the width of a human hair, or less, with 30 to 100 nanometer features. As a result, smaller and more powerful electronic devices are envisioned with speeds more than 10 times faster than today’s microprocessors and memory capacity up to 1,000 times those currently possible. This next-generation lithography approach now has the full support of the microchip industry for commercial microchip production starting in 2005-6 and continuing through 2020. Thus our x-ray research capabilities will take silicon microchips into the third decade of the new millennium, and the future of a key domestic industry is strengthened thanks to DOE’s physical sciences research.

Increase the Effectiveness of the Office of Science

Before I conclude my remarks, I want to discuss one very important point about the Office of Science. One of today’s witnesses participated in developing a paper entitled "DOE Science for the Future."That paper eloquently noted the importance of increasing the institutional visibility of the Office of Science if it is to continue to perform scientific research at the highest levels. I would characterize this need as giving the Office a distinctive identity, one that would enable it to continue its long-range research support without endangerment from other peripheral activities.

Making the Office of Science a distinctive and effective entity within the Department of Energy would also require that it be given control over those administrative areas that often affect how it carries out its mission. The Congress last year recognized this need for DOE’s Defense Programs in creating the National Nuclear Security Administration. The Office of Science has a similar need to have control over its own environment, health and safety, procurement, security and other administrative activities so that their efforts are sized according to what the programs need to accomplish their missions. In essence, responsibility and accountability must be aligned.

To summarize, DOE research in fundamental science is instrumental in the development of leading technologies that open new frontiers and bring great benefits to society. The Office of Science provides the most powerful and sensitive instrumentation and detector systems in the world, ranging from the highest resolution optical diagnostic systems for next-generation x-ray photolithography to the most powerful civilian supercomputing capability in the world. They developed the mathematical tools for studies of turbulence and combustion and are a wellspring for energy supply, efficiency, and storage devices. In addition, they have developed some of the most advanced systems for determining the structure of biological molecules, for automating genome sequencing, and for non-invasive diagnosis of disease. We cannot, however, keep living off the research investment of the last fifty years made by our predecessors. We need to continue this investment for our generations and those beyond us. Maintaining these capabilities requires significantly increasing our investment in the programs of DOE’s Office of Science, and providing the Office of Science with a distinct and effective identity, in order to help sustain the welfare of the nation in the 21st century and beyond.