[naturenews] from [nature.com]
[naturenews]
Published online 20 December 2009 | Nature 462, 978-983 (2009) | doi:10.1038/462978a
News Feature
Newsmaker of the year: The power player
As a physicist, he found a way to capture atoms and won a Nobel prize. Now he is marshalling scientists and engineers to transform the world's biggest energy economy. Eric Hand profiles the US energy secretary, Nature's Newsmaker of the Year.
Eric Hand
STEVEN CHU is heading home on a bright day in October. His motorcade of government cars powers up the slope of Cyclotron Road, past the fragrant stands of eucalyptus and through the guard station at the entrance of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The vehicles continue along Chu Road and come to a stop near the top of the hill.
The man after whom the road is named heads into Building 50, which housed his office for the five years that he ran this laboratory overlooking the University of California, Berkeley. Inside an auditorium, 225 former colleagues await his arrival. Some wear suits; others slouch in hooded sweatshirts and sandals. There is an eager anticipation in the air, and moments before Chu arrives, the crowd grows quiet. Orange-vested security guards, armed with walkie-talkies, open the doors, and Chu walks down to the podium, his entourage trailing.
"It's very good to be back here," he says, flipping open his computer. "You people know I do my own PowerPoints. That has not changed." He launches headlong into a fast-paced and scattered talk that leaps across dozens of topics, all under the banner of climate change. He clicks ahead to the crucial slide — the one that shows actual measurements of rising global temperatures outpacing what would be expected without all the carbon dioxide that humans have spewed into the atmosphere. "Here's the evidence," he says. "I have to play this over and over again."
Such is his task back in Washington DC, where Chu now works as Secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE) and a member of President Barack Obama's cabinet — the first Nobel-prizewinning scientist to hold such a high office in the US government.
{{“Necessity is the mother of invention and this is the mother of all necessities.”}
Steven Chu}
He is charged with transforming the world's biggest energy economy, and he has assumed the role of persuader-in-chief, trotting before Congress to explain the science of climate change and his plans for combating it. Meeting regularly with representatives and senators, he targets sceptics and walks them through the data. "I say, 'Come to my office and we'll talk about it'," he explains. "At the very least you can put a little doubt in their minds. If they're so sure it's natural causes, they may be less sure." It helps to have a Nobel prize, he adds.
In confronting what he sees as the most pressing problem facing the world today, Chu looks back in time to chart a way forwards. The Berkeley lab he once ran is the descendant of the Radiation Laboratory, where the physicist Ernest Lawrence helped find ways to enrich uranium for the Manhattan Project. Chemist Glenn Seaborg's team discovered plutonium there, and theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer worked just down the hill before heading into the New Mexico mountains to build the first nuclear bombs.
Chu plans to tackle climate change by reviving the scientific and technological urgency of the Manhattan Project — enlisting some of the nation's best minds to find a way to power the world without ruining it. His plans start at home, where he is trying to push the ponderous DOE to support riskier research that could yield huge dividends.
With a budget of US$27 billion, the department runs 17 national laboratories, oversees America's nuclear stockpile and manages the environmental clean-up after the early nuclear age. It is the largest source of funds for physical-science research in the United States, and this year Chu had a much bigger pot to dole out. Just one month into his tenure, Congress gave the agency $37 billion in economic stimulus money — funds that Chu is steering towards renewable energy, nuclear power, carbon-sequestration pilot plants and projects to modernize the electric grid, all of which should help to solve the climate problem. "They say that necessity is the mother of invention and this is the mother of all necessities," he says. "So we're going to get the mother of all inventions. And it's not going to be just one, it has to be many."
Hands-on manager
In the 1980s, Chu made his name scientifically by trapping atoms using lasers tuned with the utmost precision. Now he is applying that same mastery of detail to a vastly more complex system: an agency of 100,000 people working on all aspects of energy and nuclear issues.
Some Washington veterans have questioned whether Chu's research talent and hands-on style of management will serve him well, both at the DOE and amid the harsh political environment of the nation's capital. He has made some mistakes, notably in his dealings with Congress. But nearly a year into his tenure, Chu has proved that he is a quick learner. He has established himself as a voice that can be trusted by politicians of various stripes. He has helped to bridge international divides, particularly between the United States and China. And he has lured some top scientists from industry and universities to join him at the DOE in his quest.
Carol Browner, Obama's climate tsar, works often with Chu as part of the president's 'green cabinet', a group of senior officials who oversee environmental matters. "I think he's going to turn out to be the best energy secretary ever," she says. Praise also flows from some Republican politicians. Samuel Bodman, who led the DOE for former president George W. Bush, says that Chu has "shown skills as a manager. I think it was an inspired choice by the president to pick him."
Growing up in a New York suburb during the 1950s, Chu and his two brothers learned quickly that academic excellence — and competition — were family traditions. The boys would watch College Bowl, a 1960s television quiz show, and "the three of us would shout out answers and try to beat the contestants", recalls Morgan Chu, the youngest brother and a high-profile lawyer in California.
Chu's father and mother fled China during the Second World War and both did graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. The eldest son, Gilbert, followed the path of academic prestige — accumulating science degrees from Princeton University in New Jersey and MIT before gaining an MD from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Morgan did a PhD in social science before heading to Harvard Law School. Steven, on the other hand, was the A-minus student who favoured tinkering over schoolwork. In a family of Ivy Leaguers, he says he was the "academic black sheep", who settled for the University of Rochester in New York, where he studied mathematics and physics. Family pressures, he says, drove him — and frustrated him — early on, but once at Rochester, his facility for science flourished. "All of a sudden, the things they wanted me to do were very natural," he says.
On entering graduate school at Berkeley in 1970, Chu began a love affair with lasers. The work that was once a chore became the focus of an obsessive energy. "I've never been that good at apportioning time," he says. "When I got really excited about something, I would dig into it. It turns out that is a quality that the best researchers have." Another Berkeley graduate student, Phil Bucksbaum, recalled nearly getting into a fist fight with Chu because he was being "bossy about the lasers", until a third student, who had studied with Chu at Rochester, explained to Bucksbaum: "It's the way he always has been. Focused and brusque," says Bucksbaum.
Chu's graduate work using polarized light to probe atomic transitions was good enough for him to get a job at Bell Labs in New Jersey, then a utopia for basic research. Chu thrived there, but he also made sacrifices. As his work progressed, he spent more time away from home, says his ex-wife, Lisa Chu-Thielbar. Sometimes, she would smuggle his first son, Geoffrey, under her overcoat onto the laboratory campus to catch some time with his father. "He was always a scientist first and a father second," says Chu's second son, Michael, who doesn't fault his father for the singular focus that allowed him to achieve so much. "The ambition was all intellectual and scientific. Steve never cared about money. He didn't even care about advancement," says Chu-Thielbar.
After seven years at Bell Labs, Chu had a key insight in 1985 into how to trap atoms. He crossed six lasers to form what he called "optical molasses", a goo of photons. It slowed atoms nearly to a standstill, making them sluggish enough to be held by the electromagnetic forces of an additional laser.
CONTINUED ON newsnn2
[naturenews]
Published online 20 December 2009 | Nature 462, 978-983 (2009) | doi:10.1038/462978a
News Feature
Newsmaker of the year: The power player
As a physicist, he found a way to capture atoms and won a Nobel prize. Now he is marshalling scientists and engineers to transform the world's biggest energy economy. Eric Hand profiles the US energy secretary, Nature's Newsmaker of the Year.
Eric Hand
STEVEN CHU is heading home on a bright day in October. His motorcade of government cars powers up the slope of Cyclotron Road, past the fragrant stands of eucalyptus and through the guard station at the entrance of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The vehicles continue along Chu Road and come to a stop near the top of the hill.
The man after whom the road is named heads into Building 50, which housed his office for the five years that he ran this laboratory overlooking the University of California, Berkeley. Inside an auditorium, 225 former colleagues await his arrival. Some wear suits; others slouch in hooded sweatshirts and sandals. There is an eager anticipation in the air, and moments before Chu arrives, the crowd grows quiet. Orange-vested security guards, armed with walkie-talkies, open the doors, and Chu walks down to the podium, his entourage trailing.
"It's very good to be back here," he says, flipping open his computer. "You people know I do my own PowerPoints. That has not changed." He launches headlong into a fast-paced and scattered talk that leaps across dozens of topics, all under the banner of climate change. He clicks ahead to the crucial slide — the one that shows actual measurements of rising global temperatures outpacing what would be expected without all the carbon dioxide that humans have spewed into the atmosphere. "Here's the evidence," he says. "I have to play this over and over again."
Such is his task back in Washington DC, where Chu now works as Secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE) and a member of President Barack Obama's cabinet — the first Nobel-prizewinning scientist to hold such a high office in the US government.
{{“Necessity is the mother of invention and this is the mother of all necessities.”}
Steven Chu}
He is charged with transforming the world's biggest energy economy, and he has assumed the role of persuader-in-chief, trotting before Congress to explain the science of climate change and his plans for combating it. Meeting regularly with representatives and senators, he targets sceptics and walks them through the data. "I say, 'Come to my office and we'll talk about it'," he explains. "At the very least you can put a little doubt in their minds. If they're so sure it's natural causes, they may be less sure." It helps to have a Nobel prize, he adds.
In confronting what he sees as the most pressing problem facing the world today, Chu looks back in time to chart a way forwards. The Berkeley lab he once ran is the descendant of the Radiation Laboratory, where the physicist Ernest Lawrence helped find ways to enrich uranium for the Manhattan Project. Chemist Glenn Seaborg's team discovered plutonium there, and theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer worked just down the hill before heading into the New Mexico mountains to build the first nuclear bombs.
Chu plans to tackle climate change by reviving the scientific and technological urgency of the Manhattan Project — enlisting some of the nation's best minds to find a way to power the world without ruining it. His plans start at home, where he is trying to push the ponderous DOE to support riskier research that could yield huge dividends.
With a budget of US$27 billion, the department runs 17 national laboratories, oversees America's nuclear stockpile and manages the environmental clean-up after the early nuclear age. It is the largest source of funds for physical-science research in the United States, and this year Chu had a much bigger pot to dole out. Just one month into his tenure, Congress gave the agency $37 billion in economic stimulus money — funds that Chu is steering towards renewable energy, nuclear power, carbon-sequestration pilot plants and projects to modernize the electric grid, all of which should help to solve the climate problem. "They say that necessity is the mother of invention and this is the mother of all necessities," he says. "So we're going to get the mother of all inventions. And it's not going to be just one, it has to be many."
Hands-on manager
In the 1980s, Chu made his name scientifically by trapping atoms using lasers tuned with the utmost precision. Now he is applying that same mastery of detail to a vastly more complex system: an agency of 100,000 people working on all aspects of energy and nuclear issues.
Some Washington veterans have questioned whether Chu's research talent and hands-on style of management will serve him well, both at the DOE and amid the harsh political environment of the nation's capital. He has made some mistakes, notably in his dealings with Congress. But nearly a year into his tenure, Chu has proved that he is a quick learner. He has established himself as a voice that can be trusted by politicians of various stripes. He has helped to bridge international divides, particularly between the United States and China. And he has lured some top scientists from industry and universities to join him at the DOE in his quest.
Carol Browner, Obama's climate tsar, works often with Chu as part of the president's 'green cabinet', a group of senior officials who oversee environmental matters. "I think he's going to turn out to be the best energy secretary ever," she says. Praise also flows from some Republican politicians. Samuel Bodman, who led the DOE for former president George W. Bush, says that Chu has "shown skills as a manager. I think it was an inspired choice by the president to pick him."
Growing up in a New York suburb during the 1950s, Chu and his two brothers learned quickly that academic excellence — and competition — were family traditions. The boys would watch College Bowl, a 1960s television quiz show, and "the three of us would shout out answers and try to beat the contestants", recalls Morgan Chu, the youngest brother and a high-profile lawyer in California.
Chu's father and mother fled China during the Second World War and both did graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. The eldest son, Gilbert, followed the path of academic prestige — accumulating science degrees from Princeton University in New Jersey and MIT before gaining an MD from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Morgan did a PhD in social science before heading to Harvard Law School. Steven, on the other hand, was the A-minus student who favoured tinkering over schoolwork. In a family of Ivy Leaguers, he says he was the "academic black sheep", who settled for the University of Rochester in New York, where he studied mathematics and physics. Family pressures, he says, drove him — and frustrated him — early on, but once at Rochester, his facility for science flourished. "All of a sudden, the things they wanted me to do were very natural," he says.
On entering graduate school at Berkeley in 1970, Chu began a love affair with lasers. The work that was once a chore became the focus of an obsessive energy. "I've never been that good at apportioning time," he says. "When I got really excited about something, I would dig into it. It turns out that is a quality that the best researchers have." Another Berkeley graduate student, Phil Bucksbaum, recalled nearly getting into a fist fight with Chu because he was being "bossy about the lasers", until a third student, who had studied with Chu at Rochester, explained to Bucksbaum: "It's the way he always has been. Focused and brusque," says Bucksbaum.
Chu's graduate work using polarized light to probe atomic transitions was good enough for him to get a job at Bell Labs in New Jersey, then a utopia for basic research. Chu thrived there, but he also made sacrifices. As his work progressed, he spent more time away from home, says his ex-wife, Lisa Chu-Thielbar. Sometimes, she would smuggle his first son, Geoffrey, under her overcoat onto the laboratory campus to catch some time with his father. "He was always a scientist first and a father second," says Chu's second son, Michael, who doesn't fault his father for the singular focus that allowed him to achieve so much. "The ambition was all intellectual and scientific. Steve never cared about money. He didn't even care about advancement," says Chu-Thielbar.
After seven years at Bell Labs, Chu had a key insight in 1985 into how to trap atoms. He crossed six lasers to form what he called "optical molasses", a goo of photons. It slowed atoms nearly to a standstill, making them sluggish enough to be held by the electromagnetic forces of an additional laser.
CONTINUED ON newsnn2
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