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Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop (1999)

Chapter: 8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study

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Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
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8—
Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study

Nancy B. Jackson

Sandia National Laboratories

The National Laboratories

The role of the national laboratories—particularly the defense program laboratories—since the end of the Cold War has been a topic of continuing debate. The relationship of the national laboratories to industry spurred debate ranging from designating the labs as "instrumental to maintaining U.S. economic competitiveness" to concern over the perception of corporate welfare to questions regarding the industrial globalization and the possibility of U.S. taxpayer dollars supporting foreign entities. Less debated, but equally important, has been the national laboratories' potential competition with academia for federal research dollars and discussions detailing the role of each in the national research enterprise.

Industrial Collaborations

The Department of Energy's (DOE's) Technology Transfer Initiative (TTI), which grew rapidly from 1991 through 1996, was curtailed by Congress in FY 1997. Although few people would wish to replicate the TTI program, at the time it was particularly beneficial to the laboratories because it created a stimulus for cultural change, both in industry and the laboratories. Relationships were forged, visions were shared, and each side learned about the other. For the laboratories, the initial industrial collaborations were a learning experience and an awakening to the outside world. The laboratories found that industry's respect was not easily earned. The laboratories had some early failures: They had not fully appreciated the difficulty of transforming research into commercializable material; they did not always listen well or understand their partners' needs; and they met many other smart people who knew more about some things than they did. Conversely, industry found out that the laboratories were neither totally removed from the real world nor ignorant of the important technical issues confronting industry. Industry learned what the laboratories and their primary customer, the DOE, valued and what pressures the labs faced in a time of shrinking federal research budgets. Industrial partners found some very exceptional scientists doing work that was surprisingly relevant to industry.

With the discontinuation of TTI and the easy money that flowed with it, the partnerships created

Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
×

between industry and national laboratories needed to have more value to each partner in order to justify the full cost. This is the time period when fruitful industrial-national laboratory collaborations really began to flourish. Congress ended TTI because it wanted the federal share of joint work to be funded out of mission programs rather than as set-asides. The post-TTI model ensures that the work is of value to a federal program manager and is not merely "welfare" to the laboratory or the corporation.

Like many of the other national laboratories, Sandia National Laboratories is committed to maintaining its scientific excellence through continued collaborations with industry and academia. The most shining example of a Sandia and industry collaboration is the longstanding cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) that Sandia has had with the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. Together, Sandia and Goodyear are developing and validating tools for finite-element analysis for predicting thermal and mechanical responses of structures. The CRADA also includes using a variety of analytical techniques to study the structure and properties of various materials used in tire fabrication to gain an understanding of the aging and reliability of elastomers and developing methods for predicting material lifetimes. For Goodyear, these tools can be used to simulate and predict manufacturing elements such as shaping and curing processes and performance characteristics such as rolling tire resistance and hydroplaning. For Sandia and DOE, the research performed for predicting materials lifetimes is highly synergistic with work being done to support Sandia's science-based stockpile stewardship mission.

Nissim Calderon, Goodyear vice president of corporate research, as quoted in the October 1996 issue of Mechanical Engineering, explained the dual benefits in algebraic terms. "You greatly enhance the chances of success by making it a win-win situation for both the lab and the company. Say Goodyear has a two-component project, A and B, while Sandia has another project characterized by A and C. Why not do A together and share the risk, share the effort, share the cost? And while we're at it, their scientists rub elbows with ours, and naturally they exchange expertise and suggest changes in current procedures, so the laboratory is also acting as a consultant, while the lab personnel get a reality check from business."

With this as its prototype for laboratory—industry research, Sandia actively encourages industrial interactions that are mission related and enriching to the scientific base of the missions and to Sandia's technical staff. Sandia, in both its activities and structure, supports partnerships in a variety of ways. For example, Sandia is the major contributor to the development of an industrial research park located directly outside its gates: the Sandia Science and Technology Park. In another program, individual Sandia executives are assigned "ownership" or responsibility for each major corporation with whom Sandia does business, giving the company a high-level contact at Sandia who can smooth and hasten communication by acting as ombudsman, advocate, and negotiator.

University Collaborations

Regarding its relationship with academia, Sandia recognizes that partnering with universities is essential for maintaining Sandia's excellence in state-of-the-art science, for being able to tackle and solve complex problems, and to maintain the ability to recruit the best new scientists and engineers. Partnering with universities is an official strategic policy—Sandia has chosen to focus on a few key campuses (about 20) and has made a significant effort to build a relationship between the leaders of the universities and the Sandia executive management team. Top management at Sandia are campus executives, and each is tasked with developing a high-level relationship with a specific university. The universities that Sandia chose to focus on included those in which Sandia had a strong past experience of research interactions, a successful history of recruiting, effective institutional ties, and common

Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
×

future interests such as computing, research, diverse work force opportunities, and the use of information technology in teaching.

To further university interactions, particularly with Sandia's closest neighbor, the University of New Mexico (UNM), Sandia supports the Advanced Materials Laboratory (AML), a UNM building situated next to the campus and housing about 25 Sandia staff, about a third of whom have joint appointments at UNM. The building is wired for both the Sandia and the UNM networks, is accessible to foreign national students, and is the center for materials collaborative research with UNM. Although the AML houses about 1 percent of Sandia's Ph.D. staff, about 11 percent of Sandia's refereed publications are from AML staff. The AML is filled with students and visiting faculty from both the United States and abroad.

Catalysis

Catalysis and the Sandia Mission

Would a national security laboratory whose primary mission is stockpile stewardship be interested in supporting catalysis research? Catalysis interacts with and supports Sandia's missions in a number of critical ways. Catalysis and chemical reactors benefit from advances in three of Sandia's primary research foundations that form the laboratory's core competencies: materials and processes, engineering sciences, and computational and information sciences. Breakthroughs in ceramics, surface science, hydrodynamics, high-temperature chemical reactions, new porous materials, computational techniques (micro-, meso-, and macroscale), engineering diagnostics, and many other research areas that Sandia invests in for its nuclear stockpile stewardship mission can be used to impact catalysis in profound ways. In addition to the stockpile stewardship mission, Sandia also has a mission focused on advancing the surety (safety, security, and reliability) of critical infrastructures, including energy. Clearly, catalysis contributes to energy security in a number of ways: Most chemical production is dependent on petroleum based feedstocks that are synthesized using catalysts; catalysts allow the production of liquid transportation fuels from alternative sources such as natural gas or biomass; and better catalysts produce more efficient industrial production of chemicals leading to less environmental waste, greater economic viability, and less energy usage. Catalysis is also a tool for forming partnerships with the chemical and petroleum industry. It is this intertwining of catalysis and chemical reactor design with the core competencies and energy security mission of Sandia that makes it a technology that meshes well with Sandia's mission.

What motivates a program, such as the catalysis program at Sandia, to actively pursue partnerships with industry and academia? In general, the answers are not too different from what motivates Sandia National Laboratories, as a whole, to partner: to leverage federal funding (if we need A and B and you need A and C, let's do A together) and to maintain technical excellence. Rubbing elbows with industrial scientists and engineers helps keep Sandia researchers cognizant of industry's needs, information that is crucial to the study of catalysis.

Teaming and Partnering in Catalysis Research

During times of shrinking nondefense federal research dollars, the motivations for partnering become more complex, driven at times by a desire simply to survive. In the field of catalysis, this drive for survival is especially keen. Federal spending on catalysis research has decreased consistently for many years. International government investment in catalysis research has made the global market for indus-

Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
×

trial catalysis research funding highly competitive. DOE national laboratories compete directly with academia for federal funding dollars in catalysis. When in the single-investigator mode, laboratory researchers are likely to fare poorly against academia, because laboratory overhead is much greater than most university overhead. The ability to team internally, between laboratories, with industry and with universities, particularly in a multidisciplinary fashion, is a factor that can add significant value to laboratory-based research.

Recently there has been an effort for the labs to work more closely together in catalysis.1 This effort is motivated by a desire to raise the level of awareness about catalysis within the government and to educate industry more about the capabilities within the national laboratories. One of the critical motivators for collaborating with industry is the need to develop industrial advocates with Congress to maintain support for catalysis research and capabilities in the United States. Several European countries have recently invested a significant amount of funding into their catalysis research efforts. The British have recently formed the Institute of Applied Catalysis, a virtual institute of catalysis that brings together industry and academia and supports (financially) research. Through the Netherlands Institute of Catalysis (NIOK), catalysis has been one of a few disciplines to get major support from the Dutch government. It too is a virtual institute that works closely with industry and benefits from significant government financial support. Professors from seven universities in the Netherlands participate in one graduate program in catalysis, and students can take classes from any of the universities. The German Institute of Applied Chemistry Berlin-Adlershof (ACA), where catalysis research is performed and supported by the German federal government, state of Berlin, and industry, has grown by 20 percent in recent years. The French government also supports catalysis research at a singly devoted institute: France Institute of Catalysis Research in Villeurbanne, France. It is against these well-supported institutes with well maintained infrastructures that DOE national laboratories and U.S. university catalysis researchers compete for industrial support. U.S.-based chemical companies are frequently found as active and financially supportive members of the European catalysis institutes.

To be more attractive as collaborative partners to U.S. industry, the national laboratories are trying to make their capabilities better known to industry. At Sandia, an effort to tie in diverse parts of the laboratory to help potential partners solve their problems is a critical aspect of our strategy. For example, when investigating a catalyst intended for use in a slurry bubble column reactor (SBCR), we learned that our customer was also interested in learning more about the hydrodynamics of an SBCR. Over the course of several years, Sandia built an industrial-scale, nonreacting SBCR and developed diagnostics for conducting research into three-phase hydrodynamics. The SBCR was built where it could have access to the air storage tanks for the wind tunnel facility, which allowed Sandia to test highvelocity flow rates in industrially relevant diameter reactors. This is an experimental setup that would never be possible in a facility that had to depend on gas cylinders as a gas source. Sandia has also tapped into their surface and materials scientists' skills to expand new surface techniques to the study of catalysis and develop new materials and membranes to catalysis and membrane reactors. However, obtaining funding for carrying out much of the more fundamental aspects of catalysis research, despite Sandia's strong support of the catalysis effort, has been quite challenging.

Funding for Catalysis

Funding sources for catalysis research in the United States is quite dispersed and may be found in several divisions of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and four or five groups within DOE, the

1  

Mitch Jacoby, ''Planning for the Future at DOE Laboratories," Chemical & Engineering News, March 29, 1999, p. 25.

Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
×

largest being the Chemical Sciences Division in the Office of Science; and the fastest growing is the Industries of the Future Program in the Office of Industrial Technology. The Environmental Protection Agency supports a small amount of research in its Green Chemistry efforts. The American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund, a private funding source, also supports a small amount of catalysis research at universities. The scattered approach to catalysis funding leaves catalysis without a strong advocate within the federal funding structure. This is in strong contrast to the situation in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, where the Institute of Applied Catalysis and NIOK, respectively, are strong and successful advocates for government funding of catalysis.

Of course, industry also funds catalysis research both internally and externally. However, the closing of Mobil's highly acclaimed corporate research laboratory in Princeton, where zeolites were first developed, as well as closings at many other corporate laboratories, the restructuring of the petroleum industry, and the increasing focus on short-term research have led to a significant decrease in catalysis funding within the U.S. industry.

Teaming and Partnering—Its Barriers and Drivers

Because of the proprietary nature of industrial catalysis, there are many barriers to industry "outsourcing" catalysis research, particularly the development of a specific catalyst. A good catalyst provides an economic advantage to its company only when the catalyst formulation and preparation remain secret. However, industry has identified many fundamental research issues in catalysis that, if they were to be addressed, would have a significant impact on the economic vitality of the chemical industry.2 Catalysis research and technology needs were the subject of a workshop held as part of the Vision 2020 technology roadmapping process. Vision 2020: The U.S. Chemical Industry is a project sponsored by five chemical associations to identify areas requiring research in order to maintain a healthy and vital U.S. chemical industry into the year 2020 and to "roadmap" a process for accomplishing the research.3 However, the chemical industry has not entered into government-industry-university collaboration to address these fundamental research needs as, for example, the electronics industry has in precompetitive projects like SEMATECH. The reason for this lack of collaboration may stem from a historically more adversarial relationship between the government and the chemical industry than the government and the electronics industry. In Europe, where a number of countries have institutes (real and virtual) devoted to catalysis, the relationship between government and industry, including the chemical industry, appears to be different than in the United States. In Europe there is no concern about "corporate welfare," and the relationship between government and industry has been likened to the relationship in the United States between the U.S. government and the defense industry. Vision 2020 is an effort to improve the relationship between government and the chemical industry. Industry shares information regarding the technology needs it perceives as necessary to ensure a vital U.S. chemical industry in the future. Government can, and has, supported research in these areas, more effectively and efficiently spending tax dollars in support of a future robust economy.

In summary, for a national laboratory contemplating maintaining a rich and flourishing catalysis research effort, the challenges are significant. Overall federal funding for catalysis within the United

2  

N.B. Jackson, Catalysis Technology Roadmap Report, SAND97-1424 UC-1404 (Albuquerque, N.Mex.: Sandia National Laboratories, 1997).

3  

American Chemical Society, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Chemical Manufacturers Association, Council for Chemical Research, and Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association (Technology Vision 2020: Report of the U.S. Chemical Industry (Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1996).

Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
×

States is decreasing along with many other types of nondefense, energy-related federal research funding. A national laboratory must technically distinguish itself from its academic colleagues, because the cost of national laboratory research is higher than university research. Because of the strong government support of catalysis research in Europe, a U.S. national laboratory has significant competition globally for industrial investment in catalysis research. There is no strong advocate for federal funding in catalysis research because there is no one primary funding agency, and U.S. industry, historically, has not been an advocate in this area.

There is a remarkable amount of excellent catalysis research being conducted in the United States. Unfortunately, at many of the national labs, there is a lack of "critical mass" in catalysis. Many have perhaps only one to three full-time catalysis researchers along with a few surface scientists, microscopists, and/or synthetic chemists who may include some projects related to catalysis in their portfolio. The effort to get the national laboratories to work closely together is an effort to create a virtual catalysis community where "critical mass" is achieved. It is also an effort to leverage and capitalize on programs technically related to catalysis, to fully utilize all DOE materials facilities (such as the synchrotron at Brookhaven and neutron diffraction at Los Alamos), and to provide a coherent program that will attract industry's interest. As a team, the labs can also be more effective in raising the profile of catalysis research. If industry finds the laboratories' catalysis research useful, it will also likely become an advocate of catalysis research support.

Universities have also created catalysis centers to better address industry's needs and to provide a more coherent program for students. One of the most innovative of these programs is Northwestern University's NSF-funded environmental catalysis program. In this promising program, industry is invited to participate actively in the education of graduate students and the research they conduct. The national laboratories are partnering with Northwestern University and other university catalysis programs. This teaming makes for a strong package of catalysis research and benefits to industry, including well-prepared graduates.

Conclusions

What slows down this process of teaming in catalysis among laboratories? Certainly a culture of scarcity and uncertainty is the most significant contributor to an aversion to teaming or sharing and a desire, rational or not, to hold on strongly to what little has already been granted. Conversely, an entitlement attitude (undoubtedly closely related to what is sometimes called a "culture of arrogance") also discourages teaming and partnering. A researcher whose laboratory already has sufficient funding and perceives a guaranteed future support for catalysis can easily continue to work in a single-principal investigator mode. Why would that principal investigator want the difficulties or lack of control associated with a research team or a virtual laboratory?

What discourages industry from working with the laboratories or being an advocate for catalysis research within the laboratories? The difference in culture between industry and government is a significant problem. The bureaucratic burden put on a company contemplating a partnership or CRADA with a laboratory has decreased since the beginning of the 1990s but is still far greater than industry (or government) would like. Political uncertainty is always an issue. For example, industry-laboratory programs have come and then quickly gone, like the TTI. In general, the lack of a clear mission for the laboratories (beyond stockpile stewardship) contributes to the uncertainty regarding future funding and direction for the labs, increasing the risk of a long-term industrial collaboration.

Although there are many barriers to teaming among the labs and working with industry in the field of catalysis at present, particularly with the competition from Europe, the continued and sustained

Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
×

excellence of catalysis research at a large number of labs will be obtained only by working together. The labs, along with university partners, need to differentiate themselves from their competitors by providing a virtual catalysis research community that will offer multidisciplinary research, both fundamental and applied. Only by appealing to industry will the laboratories be able successfully to increase the profile and advocacy for catalysis within the United States.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Dan Hartley, vice president, Sandia National Laboratories, for his advice, his willingness to share his insights, and his relentless support of partnerships.4 This work was supported by the DOE under contract DE-AC04-94AL850000. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Discussion

Donald Burland, National Science Foundation: I am familiar with the Dutch situation. One of the things they do that we don't do is to realize that, as a small country, they cannot do everything, so they pick key areas. Maybe we have this problem that we do everything, and we don't make choices. When scarcity comes along, we still try to do everything. I wonder if there isn't some incentive to look at trying to do less and to do it well.

Nancy Jackson: I agree 100 percent. The answer for the national labs in the nondefense areas is to somehow choose the specialties and the expertise that each laboratory is going to have, which does not mean that only one lab is going to be catalysis. It just means that one laboratory might be better at surfaces, or one laboratory might do materials, or there needs to be a closing down of the areas that we get involved with.

In the beginning of the TTI program, there was a feeling at Sandia that, as scarcity began within the labs, there was an "any dead cat" mentality. That is what we called it. You drag in any dead cat for funding because it was a matter of staying alive.

We have tried to stay away from that because it is a knee-jerk reaction, not a long-term strategy. And each laboratory needs to decide what is important, or there needs to be some upper-level decision making.

In the Netherlands I was amazed to see that they ranked every professor in the system from one to five. With five being at the top, they were eligible for certain types of funding and nobody else was. This will never happen in the United States. So they are capable of doing things that we aren't. I hope it will never happen in the United States.

Randolph Guschl, Dupont: One of the fears that some of our management have is that, in catalysis, someone will do some research and discover a new catalyst that will take away a whole business. Have there been any documented cases in which that charge has been leveled at your programs?

Nancy Jackson: People say that to us all the time, but we don't have an example of it. Most of the funding agencies within the government don't fund us to develop a catalyst. They fund us to understand

4  

D.L. Hartley, The Future of the National Laboratories, SAND97-2556C (Albuquerque, N.Mex.: Sandia National Laboratories, 1997).

Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
×

why the carbon deposits on the catalyst or this type of thing. And so, yes, you might come up with a good catalyst in the meantime, but we would have to team with a company in order to make it real.

Andrew Kaldor, Exxon: This discussion on catalysis is a good example of the gulf in the scientific community in the United States. We will be facing fuel regulations in 2004, which will require low sulfur fuels. The debate on this has been going on for ages. We can do it today, but it will cost a lot of money to do it.

It would have been such an ideal opportunity for the Environmental Protection Agency to work on the regulatory part on one side of the government and the DOE to work the problem from the other side. The National Petroleum Institute says that you cannot do any of this. It would be ideal to say, "Catalysis is going to cost $100 billion to create this regulation in terms of investment in the United States. We'll develop the technology to cut that in half." It would be such a wonderful opportunity.

As you look ahead, is this really not a basis for going forward? We have found that virtually no technology exists at the universities in the United States or national labs that actually solves the problem on the time scale that we have to solve it. We have to go outside the country. Even with that there are limitations.

I am just raising this as a paradigm on these partnerships. Shouldn't the regulatory agencies, which are setting the targets, work with the other arms of the government to either encourage private industry early to find technical solutions or participate in them?

Nancy Jackson: Nowadays, industry has to say it first, and then government will do something about it. And then they'll give the labs and the universities the money to do it. But government is not, particularly in any energy-related area, going to take the ball first. No one cares. It's not important enough to the government. Gas is cheap, chemicals are bad. I could go on and on. Unless industry says it first, it's not going to happen.

James Desveaux, University of California, Los Angeles: You sound as if you have resigned yourself to a retrenchment strategy for the labs, which is a bit worrisome. You have just drawn some comparisons between Europe and the United States. One strategy is to draw in our horns and focus more on those things that we do really well. Regarding labs, this amounts to a strategic focus on comparative advantage. But from the political side, my fear is that this might result in a downward spiral for the labs, because one never knows from one Congress to the next what catches their eye and what incenses them. It seems to me that an alternative strategy might be to make the case—and I realize it is a difficult and challenging one to make—that the national labs are national resources and ought to be protected and supported as such. Why not carry the debate at a higher level of analysis, which might also protect you from some of the accusations that these labs are exploited, for instance, for corporate welfare.

Nancy Jackson: I'll go back to what I said before. Industry has to say it first. My management cannot go to Capitol Hill and say, "you know, we're great. We're a national treasure." It has to come from outside, and I don't see that happening.

It goes down to the basic relationship—I am only cognizant of the chemical and petroleum areas because of my background. But because of the historic adversary relationship in that area, we don't have industry as advocates for the labs. That is why I have been so interested in Vision 2020; we need to have industry as advocates.

There's a risk no matter what we do. Maybe I spoke negatively about this retrenching. How I really see this working together is as a joint effort on catalysis. I see it as an opportunity for the entire field of

Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
×

catalysis to grow in an interdisciplinary way. We could do this as engineers, chemists, and physicists with our incredible equipment. I see it as a rebirth of my discipline and a very exciting opportunity in the future.

John Tao, Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.: Politics aside, what are the process and the time frame to define and focus on a mission for the labs?

Nancy Jackson: We have been doing it for ten years now, and I don't think we have gotten much closer than we did before. At my own laboratory my management struggles with this. But they take it on and they make a decision as to what Sandia is going to be good at and what they're going to do. Ultimately they could be perfect. They could do a fabulous job, but ultimately it is Congress and the government that make the decisions.

Sandia and perhaps many of the other labs have done a good job in defining their missions. Internally we understand what that is. But whether this is recognized from the outside, I don't know. It's beyond my control. To a certain extent, it's beyond my management's control too.

Thomas Manuel, Council for Chemical Research, Inc.: First, the oversight that Andrew Kaldor discussed might have been remedied had the petrochemical industry become involved in the industries of the future roadmap exercise when it was first proposed, which was more or less coincident with that timing. As you said, the purpose of the roadmaps is to identify futuristic targets and provide some ammunition and support for research in those directions. So there is a mechanism.

Second, as far as gaining influence with Congress, along with calling your local representative and seeing him or her in the local office, there is a Congressional Visits Day, which is organized every year by coalitions for science and technology partnerships and for science funding, that musters over 200 individuals representing organizations that we all belong to under an umbrella group to descend on the Hill and advocate science funding and other subjects related to science that interest us. So there are mechanisms in place to influence the congressional position, and it is up to the industrial and academic people to participate in them. The Council for Chemical Research is one of a hundred organizations that participates in that effort, but we, other than the federal employees, need to get involved. It's not creating something from nothing. There are processes that are struggling to get momentum and that exist to provide this support.

Hank Whalen, PQ Corporation: You are right. Somehow or other industry has to get with it and do something, because otherwise the gloom and doom that you paint could happen.

Bruce Harrer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: I have heard rumors that the TTI program is completely going away, and I am concerned that partnerships will fall dramatically. Henry Kohlbrand of Dow Chemical talked about the desirability of having someone coming to the lab, finding out what they're doing, and finding a program linkage. If there's no flexible mechanism for the labs to get funded to go forward with these partnerships, what do we do?

Nancy Jackson: I agree. I just hope that it can be understood that it's essential to our mission, even our national defense mission, to have interaction with industry. That is the only way of convincing people that if we are going to have the best weapons or security systems or whatever, we have to be connected with the industrial community to know what the latest and greatest is and what to add or what to not add to our weapons. That is the way I see our best argument.

Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
×

Todd La Porte, University of California, Berkeley: Let me make an observation followed by an irrelevant question. I'm struck by what Nancy Jackson has shared with us. There is a sense of vulnerability of the very good analytical institutions in the United States, that we have come to expect to be remarkably good whatever happens to them. And no matter how good these institutions are, there is a willingness on the part of industry to rationalize its disregard for our society in terms of globalism. This is really extraordinarily apparent in this room today. That willingness to say, "we can go outside (overseas) and get it cheap and become international, that is, to withdraw political support from our own analytical institutions, not just Sandia."

But we know that the very same thing, not in specifics, but in the general pattern, is occurring at Los Alamos, at Livermore, and at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as well. There is a question here with regard to American industries' understanding of its role in our national security interests in the long term.

Politically, corporations have moved in the direction through Congress of cutting the capacities of our public institutions with regard to analysis. I understand some of the background for it and some of the ideological drivers. But what Nancy Jackson has told us is an example of this decline in the willingness in our political culture, and I mean its industrial cultural element, to support national analytical capabilities that are not immediately responsive to particular individual corporate interests. We could lose the whole thing over time unless there's a much greater sense of corporate stewardship as well as national stewardship with regard to these matters (supporting national analytical capacity). And I do not hear this conversation taking place anywhere. It's a very serious problem.

And now my question. How does Lockheed Martin use its management of Sandia to help its own corporate intelligence with regard to technology? Does that work, and if so, how?

Nancy Jackson: I am not comfortable commenting on that, except that, as you can imagine, they are more closely in touch with the kind of science and engineering that we are doing at Sandia because they physically work with it. And so they benefit just intellectually, if nothing else, from that type of interaction.

Todd La Porte: You are doing better than the University of California.

Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
×
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Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
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Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
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Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
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Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
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Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
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Page 102
Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
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Page 103
Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
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Page 104
Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
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Page 105
Suggested Citation:"8 Partnering at the National Laboratories: Catalysis as a Case Study." National Research Council. 1999. Research Teams and Partnerships: Trends in the Chemical Sciences, Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9759.
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Page 106
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The third workshop of the Chemical Sciences Roundtable, Research Teams and Partnerships was held in Irvine, California, on May 2-3, 1999. The presentations and discussions at the workshop considered the current status of research partnerships in the chemical sciences and methods to improve the ability to form and maximize such collaborations. This volume presents the results of that workshop.

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