Shank said the key to the future health of the Laboratory is to continue its world-class work in fundamental science.
"Fundamental science remains the core of our mission," Shank said. "But in the years ahead, we must also show the nation how it receives value from this science. We must be able to cite examples like our development of low-emissivity windows. The low-E windows sold in this country today, almost all of which are based upon our research, provide a $250 million annual energy savings to this country. That savings is more than the Laboratory's entire annual budget."
Shank said current projections show almost no increase in LBL's budget in fiscal year 1993. This, he said, is largely because of the likely shutdown of the Bevalac. Shank said efforts continue to find funding for Bevalac programs but so far, this support has not been obtained.
Shank devoted the great majority of his talk to describing recent scientific developments at the Laboratory, noting the impossibility of mentioning all or even many of the Laboratory's achievements.
In the Materials Sciences Division, John Clarke and his co-workers have developed a supersensitive detector known as a SQUID magnetometer, made from multilayer thin films of high-temperature superconductors, and used it to record faint magnetic fields produced by the human heart. The experiment demonstrated the feasibility of using high-temperature superconductors in the fabrication of complex devices such as electronic circuits.
Charles Harris, head of the Chemical Sciences Division, has developed a very promising new technique for measuring the properties of electrons at metallic interfaces. The method is very sensitive to structure and molecular composition at the interface, and can determine how the electron is affected by the individual molecular layers, layer by layer.
Steve Selkowitz, Dariush Arasteh, and Brent Griffith of the Energy and Environment Division have developed high-performance gas-filled panel insulation that is a leading candidate to replace the ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) foam now used in the walls of refrigerators. The new plastic and foil panels filled with inert gases have insulation values of up to R15 per inch, twice the thermal resistance of conventional CFC-blown foams.
As an outgrowth of the pioneering radiotherapy program at the Bevalac, a project is underway to construct a 250 MeV proton accelerator and Proton Therapy Center at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. Plans call for the $25 million project to be privately funded. AFRD's Jose Alonso is leading an LBL team charged with devising the preliminary design for the accelerator and beam delivery system as LBL helps transfer what it has learned during its 40 years of involvement with radiation therapy into a hospital setting.
In two highly significant areas of atherosclerosis research, Life Sciences researchers Edward Rubin and Ron Krauss have achieved important new results. Using transgenic mice genetically engineered to have high levels of high density lipoprotein (HDL, the "good cholesterol"), Rubin obtained the first direct experimental evidence that HDL can protect against heart disease. "The transgenic mice can pig-out on a high-fat, junk food diet and still end up with arteries clean as a whistle," Shank said. Normal mice fed the same diet, he noted, developed arterial fat deposits.
In a related development, Krauss found further evidence for the genetic basis of heart disease. Krauss and his team discovered a gene present in 25 to 30 percent of the population that predisposes individuals to increased heart attack risk. Discovery of this marker for heart disease on chromosome 19 may make possible the development of a simple test to screen humans for the susceptibility to heart disease.
Chemical Biodynamics' Peter Schultz is beginning "to perform miracles in chemistry," said Shank. Shultz is creating catalytic antibodies that have a range of remarkable attributes. The scientist has used the process to successfully catalyze a long list of reactions. Shank noted that some of these are reactions that heretofore have been alien to biology. Other reactions are being triggered that never before have been susceptible to catalysis.
A team led by Earth Science's Ernie Majer is developing new techniques that provide a higher resolution picture of the Earth's subsurface. LBL has refined these tomographic techniques ("like a CAT scan of the earth") during two decades of research on the exploration of geothermal reservoirs and the characterization of underground sites for the planned storage of nuclear waste. Now, the techniques are finding further use in environmental remediation and the recovery of oil.
Engineering's Schlomo Caspi and AFRD's Clyde Taylor led an effort that has designed a ten-tesla dipole magnet, a record field for an accelerator magnet. The magnet has a unique thin-collar design and Shank said he expects new accelerator facilities to take advantage of this development.
In the field of environmental restoration in LBL's own back yard, a team led by Earth Sciences' Iraj Javandel has identified and characterized subsurface contaminants on the Hill and found a plume of water that contains solvents. The highest concentrations, of 185 parts per billion, appear in the vicinity of Building 46A near a former sewer. In addition to detecting and monitoring work, the Lab is using an extraction well to drain the contaminated water, which is then treated and used as make-up water in the cooling tower for the Bevalac.
Information and Computing Sciences' Jane Macfarlane has developed a computer visualization of a flame, a tool that ultimately will help in the effort to design low-pollution combustion devices. The image shows turbulent regions of the flame where particularly high concentrations of emissions are generated. Shank said LBL scientists hope to be able to incorporate chemical information into this visual model, thus providing a further refinment in the understanding of how to minimize the formation of combustion pollutants.
Nuclear Sciences' Marie-Agnes Stephens and her co-workers are studying oddly stable spheroids that are the occasional products of off-center collisions between nuclei. The resulting superdeformed nuclei decay through a series of steps producing characteristic spectral bands. The puzzle that has been emerging from recent experiments is that these spectral bands are in many cases virtually identical -- despite the fact that the nuclei contain different number of protons and neutrons. The explanation of this unusual behavior is sure to bring new insights into nuclear structure.
Carl Haber and his co-workers in Physics Division's Collider Detector Facility (CDF) team and Engineering Division's advanced detectors group designed and constructed the electronic data acquisition system for the new silicon-strip vertex detector -- the most advanced of its kind in the world. The new detector, installed in the CDF at Fermilab, will play an important role in the search for the top quark, getting under way this spring.