The nation's largest collection of nuclear experts here has given new meaning to "beating swords into plowshares."
We have learned of confidential talks for joint projects between the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Agriculture Department. The plan is to use "Star Wars," supercomputers and other sophisticated technology to give a boost to American farmers in any way possible. Among the projects being discussed are development of:- A device to be mounted in front of tractors that would sniff out nitrogen compounds and adjust the rate of fertilizer applied for every square foot of field.
- Another device mounted on the front of tractors that would hunt out each weed and apply the right amount and type of pesticide to them, instead of blanket-spraying of the toxic chemicals by plane.
- Highly accurate agricultural maps using geo-positioning satellites.
But these new projects are only the tip of the iceberg. Sixty percent of the lab's $1.1 billion budget is nuclear weapons-related, so the breakup of the Soviet Union forced scientists here to shift their priorities - lest the lab's days be numbered.
To cheers and applause last May, President Clinton spoke to the assembled employees in the high mountain range here. He expressed his appreciation for the lab's long service to the country by calling it a "great national mind treasure, the world's finest scientists and engineers - more Ph.D.s per capita here in Los Alamos than any other place on the planet."
But then Clinton told the employees that he needed them to turn their attention to helping him with his domestic and economic agenda. "So we've had to re-tool our laboratory," says Siegfried Hecker, the lab's director, "to re-examine and re-engineer."
Among their projects already under way are:
- A cooperative effort with the Big Three auto companies to produce in a decade a non-polluting vehicle that gets 821/2 miles per gallon using "Star Wars"-type technology.
- A joint project with oil and gas companies to extract more of the oil and gas that's left in the ground, using computer-driven tools.
- Key participation in the human genome project, which seeks to map all 3 billion-plus chemical pairs of DNA types in humans, the better to separate the defects that produce about 4,000 genetic diseases.
- Establishing themselves already as the world's leading data base on HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, already counting some 2,000 users worldwide as customers by modem to the computer database.
- Assistance, as the world's top super-computing center, in building a "national information infrastructure," a so-called "superhighway" of information passing between computers at high rates, roughly equivalent to transmitting 50 Bibles per second.
But the lab's ability to further these achievements may be hindered by a bloated bureaucracy and a decades-old obsession with secrecy that obstructs cooperative efforts with civilian partners.