Lawrence Barkeley National Lab

Steinbeck, standing above the Salinas Valley, addresses readers as he muses to his dog that “In the spring, Charley, when the valley is carpeted with blue lupines like a flowery sea, there’s a smell of heaven up here, the smell of heaven” (158).  Spring it was when we arrived.  A series of smells propelled us forward in northern California.  The lupines were blooming in the valleys and along road sides.  In San Francisco and Berkeley the purple flowers of trees I did not recognize mixed with the smells of jasmine and eucalyptus to welcome us with sensory delight.

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab was another kind of welcome.  Ed Turano and his several colleagues gave of their time and enthusiasm to speak to us about their work.  Their vision of the future is as multi-faceted as a gem stone.  I found myself caught up as the various scientists explained current work and future possibilities.  There is no single vision.  There, as at Fermi, is a profound sense of the essential interdisciplinarity of the work.  Physicists talk to chemists who talk to biologists who talk to those who drive the second largest super-computer in the world, and all take time to talk to us.  I am deeply grateful again for the opportunity to share in their passions for a little while.

Super-computing did seem the point of intersection for the other sciences.  There is a convergence of nano technology and cosmic, of biology and physics at the point of future visions.  As we drive from Berkeley down to the Salinas Valley I continue to mull over the bio-fuel project at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI).  “Materials by design” we heard in the morning round table discussion with Jim Siegrist, Kathy Yelick, Melissa Summers and Ed Turano.  We then saw the electron microscope and the three-dimensional simulations of the structures the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) has seen. I am not surprised by the geometrical perfection of the forms.  My vision of the universe requires crystalline perfection at the nano-level as well as at the cosmic.  Beauty does not surprise me; it does, however, delight.  Human inventiveness, human creativity and imagination provide sensory delight.

For that reason, perhaps, I find myself most mesmerized by Blake Simmons’s work at JBEI.  Americans’ demand for energy, our demand for fuel, is in no danger of decreasing.  What will be our solution to this demand?  As we stood in the grow rooms at JBEI I could not help but feel the excitement of the possibilities.  Switch grass and pine trees rendered to a primordial ooze may solve the problem of our need.  Some bits of heaven begin with imagination.

~ Margaret Downs-Gamble