Accomplishments and Awards

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.

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 nuclear medicine. 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, University of California - Santa Cruz, 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.

Our Legacy