Top 10 DOE Office of Science Achievements in 2003

International Fusion Energy Project.

In January 2003, President Bush committed the U.S. to participate in the largest and most technologically sophisticated research project in the world, ITER, to harness the promise of fusion energy, the same form of energy that powers the sun. Throughout 2003 the ITER Parties negotiated an understanding on sharing the cost of ITER, on allocating the hardware procurements, and on most of the terms and conditions of a formal Agreement. The site decision remains to be completed, and a plan is being implemented to reach consensus on the site in early 2004.

If successful, this $5 billion, internationally supported research project would advance progress toward producing clean, renewable, commercially available fusion energy by the middle of the century.

High Performance Computing for Science.

In September 2003, 10 Federal Agencies, under the leadership of DOE’s Office of Science and the Department of Defense, delivered the President’s Science Advisor a comprehensive plan to help ensure U.S. leadership in high performance computing for science in the next decade. This leadership is critical for the security and prosperity of the Nation, with impacts in fields ranging from the design of automobiles and aircraft to the design of new pharmaceuticals.

Human Genome Sequence Finished.

In April 2003, the International Human Genome Consortium announced the completion of the sequencing of the human genome. The DOE Joint Genome Institute produced nearly 12% of the sequence, human chromosomes 5, 16, and 19, which includes the most gene-rich human chromosome (number 19). Deciphering our genomic “text” will be a major focus of future biology, relying in part on extensive comparisons with related sequences such as the frog, Fugu fish, and sea squirt all sequenced by the JGI.

Dark Energy Confirmed.

Confirming earlier spectacular discoveries, many independent measurements, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, now show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating due to “Dark Energy,” which makes up 73 percent of the energy density of the universe. The proposed SuperNova Acceleration Probe (SNAP) is one option for a space-based Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) with NASA, designed to measure the expansion history of the universe and uncover the nature of dark energy. The overwhelming evidence for the mysterious Dark Energy was chosen the 2003 “Breakthrough of the Year” by the editors of Science.

Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences Groundbreaking.

On July 18, 2003, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham broke ground on the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) at the Oak Ridge National Lab, a $65 million dollar research and development facility dedicated to the study of nanoscale research. The Secretary stated, “It represents a beginning of a revolution in science, opening up a broad array of innovation in materials science, biology, medicine, technologies for environmental research and national security.” The CNMS will be the first of five Energy Department Nanoscale Science Research Centers, a national user facility serving up to 300 scientists annually from universities, industries, and federal laboratories. The Oak Ridge facility will be built adjacent to the department’s Spallation Neutron Source, thus providing researchers ready access to the world’s most powerful neutron source for sample structure and dynamics at the nanoscale level.

Progress in Restoring Sight to the Blind.

The collaborative project between five DOE National Laboratories, the Doheny Eye Institute, University of California at Santa Cruz, North Carolina State, and Second Sight Corporation to develop an artificial retina achieved a number of notable technical successes. A new material, rubberized silicon, was micro machined and performed well in pre-clinical testing and will be used to support the multielectrode array essential to advance to the next step in helping the blind see. A novel technology using finely powdered diamond crystals was developed to hermetically seal the device to protect it in the eye for the lifetime of the patient. 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.

Stitching Together A Genome and Learning to Use Microbes to Solve National Needs.

The genome of a harmless, approximately 6,000 base pair bacterial virus, a bacteria phage, has been successfully stitched together from commercially available starting materials in just a few days. This is a first important step in a journey that will enable us to develop microbes that can be used to address vital Energy Department missions in clean energy production, carbon sequestration, and environmental clean-up.

The Nature of Nuclear Matter.

Experiments reveal three exciting new aspects of the nature of nuclear matter:

• In 2003, scientists at Thomas Jefferson National Laboratory Facility in Newport News, Virginia, as well as at other foreign facilities, found evidence of a previously unobserved five-quark particle, named a pentaquark. Only two and three quark particles have previously been observed.
• Results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collder at Brookhaven National Laboratory showed that central gold-gold collisions produce samples of hot, dense, nuclear matter quite different from that of ordinary nuclear matter and revealed the first clues on the predicted existence of a primordial form of matter called the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP).
• Data from the Kamioka Liquid Scintillator Anti-Neutrino Detector (KamLAND) in Japan, together with other solar neutrino detectors (Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and Kamiokande), provide further evidence that neutrinos oscillate from one type to another and that they possess mass. SNO measured the total neutrino flux from the sun unambiguously for the first time, not just the electron-type neutrinos, and confirmed the original predictions of the solar model developed principally by John Bahcall. (Bahcall was a co-winner of the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award in 2003.)

SPEAR3 Completed Within its Budget and Ahead of Schedule:

The Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Ring (SPEAR3) Upgrade is a Major Item of Equipment project funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Office of Basic Energy Sciences – each providing $29M. The project started in 1999 and was completed three months ahead of schedule, and within its $58M budget. The SPEAR3 Upgrade project replaced the existing SPEAR2 storage ring with a new lattice system that will increase the brightness of the source of synchrotron radiation 40 times for experiments at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. These extremely bright x-rays can be used to investigate various forms of matter ranging from objects of atomic and molecular size to man-made materials with unusual properties. The obtained information and knowledge is of great value to society, with impact in areas such as the environment, future technologies, health, and national security. The expeditious manner in which this project was carried out will result in an interruption of the user program at SSRL of only 12 months, also a significant achievement.

DOE Undergraduate Research Internships.

In Fiscal Year 2003, theDOE’s Office of Science of Science placed more than 500 students at its National Laboratories with scientists in three undergraduate research internship programs. All of the students are required to complete an abstract and research paper of their research project for publication in the Journal of Undergraduate Research.