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 nuclearmedicine. 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, 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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