Testimony of Dr. Raymond L. Orbach
Director, Office of Science
Before the
House Science Committee
Subcommittee on Energy
July 25, 2002

Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today about DOE's Office of Science and some of the very exciting challenges that lie before us. But before I talk about where we are going, I want to start by talking about where we are, with maybe a few words about where we've been.

A UNIQUE ROLE IN U.S. SCIENCE
The Office of Science fills a unique and central role in the country's scientific endeavor. While our work is complementary to that of other government research agencies, we distinguish ourselves by our emphasis on research that takes the long view, is open and interdisciplinary, requires the use of large-scale facilities, and takes risks commensurate with the high pay-offs we expect.

DOE's Office of Science (SC) funds basic research in support of DOE missions, and is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences, providing approximately 40 percent of all Federal funds in this area over the past decade. It is the steward, and by far the principal funding agency, of the Nation's research programs in high-energy physics, nuclear physics, and fusion energy sciences. It also manages important programs of fundamental research in basic energy sciences, biological and environmental sciences, and computational science, all of which also support the Department's other missions in environmental restoration, defense, and energy security. SC is the Federal Government's largest single funder of materials and chemical sciences, and also supports unique or critical pieces of U.S. research in climate change, geophysics, genomics, and the life sciences.

Some within the scientific community are concerned for future government support for the physical sciences. The physical sciences are the underpinning of discoveries in many areas of research including biology, chemistry and computing, and arguably serve as an engine for ultimate economic growth and national security.

The Office of Science manages the construction and operation some of the Nation's most advanced R&D facilities, located at national laboratories and universities. These include particle and nuclear physics accelerators, synchrotron light sources, neutron scattering facilities, supercomputers, and high-speed computer networks. Each year, these facilities are used by more than 17,000 researchers from universities, other government agencies and private industry. These facilities are essential to progress in a wide range of scientific fields. As an example, the light sources now operated by the Office of Science serve more than three times the total number of users and twenty times as many users from the life sciences as they did in 1990. Structural biologists are now producing more than seven times as many protein structures in a year using synchrotron light sources as they were in 1990.

The Office of Science also funds research at the national laboratories and at 250 colleges and universities located across the country. Excluding funds used to construct or operate our facilities approximately 50% of our base research funding goes to support research at universities and institutes. Academic scientists and their students are funded through peer-reviewed grants, and SC's funding of university research has made it a dominant supporter of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the physical sciences during their early careers.

In managing its programs, SC makes extensive use of peer review and federal advisory committees to develop general directions for research investments, to identify priorities, and to determine the very best scientific proposals to support. In addition, the Office of Science utilizes six federal advisory committees to provide scientific guidance, and as an important means of communication with, and consensus-building within, the scientific community.

A HISTORY OF ACCOMPLISHMENT
The Office of Science funded the research that led to the discovery of all but one (the electron) of the most fundamental constituents of matter, namely quarks and leptons, which in turn has led to 13 Nobel Prizes and confirmation of the Standard Model, one of the great intellectual achievements of the twentieth century. In 1974, DOE decided to connect its geographically-dispersed researchers through a network to a single computer center—a revolutionary, cost effective mechanism that provided supercomputing power to civilian researchers for the first time and established a network model which other government agencies and states adopted for their researchers. SC subsequently worked with other agencies (DARPA, NSF and NASA) to transform the large number of independent networks that existed in the 1980's into a single integrated communications network that provided the basis for today's commercial internet. SC also installed the first supercomputer available to the civilian research community that broke the 1 teraflop peak performance barrier and supported the development of the first civilian scientific application to achieve over 1 teraflop actual performance.

Since 1993, the Office of Science has completed, on time and within budget, construction of the Advanced Photon Source, the Advanced Light Source, the Main Injector at Fermilab, the B-Factory at Stanford, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory and the National Spherical Torus Experiment, a fusion experiment, and we are currently building the Spallation Neutron Source on schedule and within budget. We credit our outstanding track record in construction to a highly effective management and review process, now commonly called a "Lehman Review" after the man who runs the program. We have been so successful that Lehman reviews are now considered a "best practice" across the U.S. government, and we are being consulted by CERN, Europe's premier particle physics laboratory, on construction of their Large Hadron Collider, a facility to which the US is contributing $531 million.

The wide range of scientific disciplines required to support facility users at national laboratories, and the wide range of mission-driven research supported by SC, have developed an interdisciplinary capability that is extremely valuable to some of the most important scientific initiatives of the 21st century. For example, in both the Human Genome Program and the Global Climate Change Program started by the Office of Science in the 1980's to address the impact of radiation on human health and the use of energy on the environment, SC brought the rigor and techniques of the physical sciences to bear. In the Human Genome Program, this led to the sequencing technologies and software tools that made sequencing feasible by speeding the process and greatly reducing the costs. In climate change research, SC is bringing its experience in supercomputing and scientific simulation, developed in other research fields, to bear on this complex and important issue. SC's history of interdisciplinary research and facility operation also positions it to make a unique contribution to the new national initiative in nanoscience. Similarly, SC's long history of leadership in scientific computing positions it to take the lead in applying the capabilities of supercomputers to the large scientific computing problems posed by many of today's cutting edge research needs in areas ranging from astrophysics to nanoscience.

Finally, I can point out with great pride that the Office of Science funded the work of both the distinguished scientists on the panel with me today.

Between 1978 and 1994 the Division of Chemical Sciences supported Dr. Smalley in his experiments on carbon clusters that eventually led to his discovery of a new form of carbon, called buckminsterfullerene, or "buckyballs," which contains 60 carbon atoms in the shape of a soccer ball. For this Dr. Smalley won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996. Discovery of the structure and properties of fullerenes, first determined at SC synchrotron national light sources and neutron scattering facilities, are spurring a revolution in carbon chemistry and may lead to a profusion of new materials, polymers, catalyst and drug delivery systems. Today SC is supporting research, building on Dr. Smalley's discoveries, into construction of nanotechnologies such as microscopic carbon tubes with lengthwise holes only a billionth of a meter in diameter that may have greater tensile strength than steel and conduct electricity as well as metal.

The Office of Science is proud, also, to have supported Dr. Friedman and his colleagues in the breakthrough discoveries on the structure of matter that won them the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics. Dr. Friedman's investigations, conducted at SC's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California, found clear signs that there exists an inner structure in the protons and neutrons of the atomic nucleus. In what has become known as the "SLAC-MIT experiment" Dr. Friedman and others illuminated protons and neutrons with beams from a giant "electron microscope"—the two-mile-long accelerator at SLAC—to postulate quarks as the fundamental building blocks of protons and neutrons.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE FUTURE
As we plot our course into the future, the Office of Science has begun a dialog with the larger scientific community to identify the great opportunities that lie before us. A result of this is a series of "occasional papers" on topics of particular interest and importance that we have posted on our website. Currently we have developed eight papers, ranging from the importance of the search for "dark energy," now believed to constitute more than 60% of our universe; to novel approaches to countering terrorism, to our ideas about maintaining and upgrading our scientific infrastructure. I urge you to read them all, but today I want to talk about three.

Scientific Computing. Over the past two decades, the increase in computing power has been exponential, doubling every 18 months. As a result, the latest generation of desktop computers is more powerful than the most advanced supercomputers of the 1980's, and today's supercomputers have peak speeds thousands of times faster yet. For decades, we have used computers to solve sets of equations describing physical processes. This progress not only allows us to solve ever more complex sets of equations, but also to use simulation to solve problems for which there are no known predictive equations. In the March 2000 report to the Congress from the Office of Science, "Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing", we identified major scientific questions critical to our research programs whose answers rely on high performance computing. They include:

Predicting the function and structure of proteins from knowledge of DNA sequences,
Predicting the effects of fatigue on materials,
Improving the efficiency and specificity of catalysts for more energy efficient industrial processes,
Modeling control of the instabilities that lead to loss of power in fusion devices, and
Prediction of the evolution of the earth's regional climates decades and centuries into the future.
I believe that scientific simulation is becoming a third leg of the structure that supports scientific progress, on a par with theory and experiment. Our Scientific Discovery through Advance Computing program has led the way in making this a reality, applying the capabilities of highly parallel computers based on commercially available processors to large scientific problems. In doing this, a central problem has been creating software and algorithms that can make effective use of the full capabilities of computers not specifically designed for particular problems.

Recently, however, a new supercomputer developed in Japan has allowed that country to claim leadership in the capability to address an important class of research problems. By designing computers that meet the specific needs of scientists—adapting the architecture of the computer to the problem rather than the reverse—they have realized effective performance on global climate change models an order of magnitude greater than we can achieve.

This development presents our Nation's our scientific computing program with a challenge today, and the Office of Science is well positioned to take on that challenge. I am confident that, in conjunction with our domestic computer industry, we can do so.

Building a 21st Century Workforce. The standard of living we now enjoy and the security of our Nation rests in no small degree on the quality of science and technology education we provide our Nation's students from elementary through graduate school. However, our Nation is failing to produce both a scientifically literate citizenry and the kind of workforce we will need in the 21st Century. Consider the following: Test scores from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) placed the U.S. participants near the bottom of the 16 countries that administered the physics and advanced mathematics tests; engineering majors in the U.S. declined by 35% between 1975 and 1998; and in 1999, while U.S. colleges granted over 125,000 social science undergraduate degrees, it granted a mere 19,000 in the physical sciences. There are many reasons for America's failure in science education, but as the National Commission on Science and Mathematics teaching pointed out, teacher preparation stands out as both a major contributing factor and something for which all scientific institutions can play a role in solving. We believe the multidisciplinary, team-centered, scientific culture of our national laboratories is an ideal setting for teachers to make the connections between the science and technology principles they are asked to teach. From 1989 through 1995 we provided science and math teachers with 8-week summer fellowships at our laboratories. To quote one participant, this was "…a chance to become involved in gut level science as practiced by those who devote their lives to it. It's being treated as a respected member of the scientific community." I would hope that we can reconstitute and expand this program in the future.

Nanoscience. Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, the study and manipulation of matter at the atomic and molecular level, has enormous promise for our future. To quote the President's Science Advisor, Dr. Marburger, "The revolution I am describing is one in which the notion that everything is made of atoms finally becomes operational. … We can actually see how the machinery of life functions, atom-by-atom. We can actually build atomic scale structures that interact with biological or inorganic systems and alter their functions. We can design new tiny objects "from scratch" that have unprecedented optical, mechanical, electrical, chemical, or biological properties that address needs of human society."

The Office of Science has a major role in the nanoscience revolution. Progress will require large, well-equipped Centers to provide state-of-the-art nanofabrication and characterization equipment in an environment that is conducive to research having a scope, complexity, and disciplinary breadth not seen in traditional individual investigator efforts. Such Centers are now in design at five DOE laboratories - laboratories that are each home to one of our x-ray or neutron scattering sources. These Centers, defined with the help of hundreds of scientists from universities and industry who attended widely advertised Center-sponsored workshops, will be open user facilities and will transform the Nation's approach to nanoscale science.

Building on the five Nanoscale Science Research Centers, which are DOE's signature activity in nanoscale science, we will work with other agencies to create a national program that encompasses new science, new tools, and new computing capabilities. Researchers from universities, industry, and national laboratories will work side-by-side at the Centers and will be supported in coordinated programs to address scientific challenges in a broad array of subjects including materials sciences, chemistry, polymer sciences, catalysis, and more.

Thank you again for the chance to speak with you today. I am very excited about the mission of the Office of Science and opportunities we see for the future. I hope to work with you to ensure that the Office continues to contribute to the Nation as we have done in the past. I am now available to answer any questions you may have.