LANL Director Thom Mason speaks to a crowd Monday afternoon at Fuller Lodge during the LANL Showcase and Demo Day, which was a part of ScienceFest. Photo by Kirsten Laskey/ladailypost.com
Fuller Lodge was filled during LANL Director Thom Mason’s talk Monday afternoon. Photo by Kirsten Laskey/ladailypost.com
By KIRSTEN LASKEY
Los Alamos Daily Post
kirsten@ladailypost.com
During the Cold War, the U.S. enjoyed being the biggest, best player on the world stage but then the Cold War ended, and the U.S. found itself in a completely different playing field.
During his talk for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Showcase and Demo Day Monday at Fuller Lodge, LANL Director Thom Mason explained how the U.S., specifically national laboratories, are forging through this new world.
The U.S. government invested in research and development during the Cold War era with little thought if it would bring any economic benefit, he said. The country didn’t need to; it had the biggest economy and the largest research and development (R&D). This changed, however, when the Cold War ended. The U.S. got competitors. In response, it decided it would make the world flat – meaning the playing field would be leveled by getting all countries to accept capitalism and democracy systems and the U.S. would operate faster on this playing field.
This worked well but now countries are tossing this aside and making their own rules, Mason said.
So now what?
He argued that for the national laboratories, it doesn’t need to be strictly for their government-directed missions.
“If we can solve our missions – we have to do that – but if we can also solve our mission problems in a way that creates additional value that (could) help us deal with a not-as-flat-as-we-would-like world,” Mason said.
This is not a novel notion; he pointed out that laboratories’ work inspiring technology that offers significant economic benefit to everyone has always been there.
Mason said that after the Manhattan Project era there was the Cold War era in which the U.S. enjoyed being the biggest and best player in the world. It invested in a lot of fundamental research and defense without thought about if it would benefit the economy.
“One of the reasons why I think it worked pretty well was because for much of that era the U.S. economy was not only the largest in the world, but it was also larger than everyone else put together,” Mason said. “And the U.S. R&D enterprise was not only the largest in the world, but it was also larger than everyone else put together. So what that meant was if there was an important scientific discovery that had the potential for application, you didn’t have to do much to make sure the U.S. got a significant benefit because most likely it was either discovered here or we were heavily involved in the discovery because we had the largest R&D enterprise and mostly likely it would have commercialized here because we had the largest economy.”
There are numerous examples of this, Mason said. One is GPS. The idea came about when Sputnik was circling the earth and physicists at John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) were tasked with locating Sputnik by triangulation. Three ground stations measured the timing of the satellite’s pulses to figure out where Sputnik was and track its progress over the U.S.
What these physicists discovered, Mason said, is that if you could take three ground stations and figure out where a satellite was, then you could use three satellites to find yourself on the earth. This tied into work APL was doing with targeting of separating ballistic missiles.
Today, GPS has a whole other value.
“GPS is a hugely important component of our economy and I am pretty sure that if a couple of physicists in their backyard said, ‘Hey, we can bring a constellation of satellites that will allow you to drive to a coffee shop and purchase a cup of coffee,’ that is not going to go anywhere … but now there’s been a huge economic value created … the U.S. government did two important things, they solved the problems that made it work … and then they got out of the way,” Mason said. “They actually opened it up so that you didn’t have to have a security clearance to have a GPS device … innovation happened. It’s provided huge value obviously to our national security but a lot of economic value as well.”
When a new era began with the end of the Cold War, things changed.
“Suddenly we were no longer winning just because we were bigger than everyone else,” Mason said. “We had international competitors that we had to respond to.”
The government could no longer invest in R&D and assume everything would work out, he explained. A new model needed to be developed.
Mason said the U.S. concluded that capitalism and democracy won the Cold War and it would promulgate these systems globally. The U.S. would get everyone to agree to these systems, level the playing field and the U.S. would operate faster using tools such as venture capital.
He argued that a new era is being entered in which some countries don’t like the rule book and are making their own rules. As a result, the U.S. needs to figure out how to evolve its innovation model to respond to this new world.
For the laboratory, Mason said, “The discussion that we have here about how we facilitate the movement of government funded innovation … into the private sector and do it in a way that translates into value regionally and nationally is a really important discussion to have.”
“I think there are ways that we can have impact through our mission activities that are kind of exciting,” he added, highlighting the laboratory’s work on the Mars rover and the supercomputer.
It’s important to remind everyone that the national labs don’t make or sell anything so the only way their ideas turn into economic value is when they hand them to someone who does offer that. This makes the people element invaluable, Mason said.
“The people part of the equation is really important.”