Ramblemuse Touch Points

For thirty-six years, I was a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), most of the time spent doing some variation of atmospheric science and simulation with an extended foray into nonlinear solvers. But no more. As of last Friday, I became part of the “road-kill” in a process of lab downsizing. Following a congressionally-forced transition last October from management by the University of California (for fifty years) to management to a newly coined LLC, I’d foreseen the likelihood of “clear-air turbulence” and planned accordingly. I was in a position to substantially compensate against loss of position and did. Others weren’t as fortunate.

While, I expect a few ups and downs, I’m already starting the process of “resurrection” into freelancing and consulting — not to imply that I’m anywhere near clear yet on all the details, but that will come. The road-kill armadillo above has already become a symbol for the process. My wife was at an antique fair today, saw an armadillo purse, and came home with it. It’s now hanging on a bookcase.

I would lay part of the blame for all of this on the LLC itself. Some of the increases in operation costs should have been anticipated. An increase in per person health plan costs in going from a large, full-state, university to a single-campus northern California business is one of those. That more people would choose portability in retirement plans than did at a similar transition for LANL could also have been forecast. The SF Bay Area holds far more options for job portability than does Los Alamos. Someone in the planning for the management contract bid, simply missed the mark widely. It also may well be that the bid, as framed, wasn’t economically feasible to begin with. The fiscally responsible response may have been simply not to bid, but that’s now history. The main problems do, however, come not from the LLC but from U.S. attitudes and from the short-sightedness of congressional planning.

I’d previously blogged on U.S. attitudes to science and higher learning under Can we “save” science in a culture of anti-intellectualism? The planning part comes in science funding having been flat for years, which, with inflation, means continually decreasing. That has led to the reports noted in my prior blog post and to the National Academy report Rising Above the Gathering Storm (RAGS) on U.S. competitiveness. While many promises have been made, an article in the the 8 May issue of Nature notes that “The Gathering Storm Rages On”. A similar article in the 9 May issue of Science notes that “Going From RAGS to Riches Is Proving to Be Very Difficult”. Many scientific institutions are having difficulties and layoffs under the current system of too little and too late funding; it isn’t just a national laboratory issue. On the other hand, national laboratories, because of the scope of interdisciplinary research they attempt, are likely more vulnerable to increased costs from micromanagement by the Department of Energy and failures from marginal funding. These issues came out in a 30 April hearing of the Senate subcommittee on water and energy which you can watch. About 2 hours into a 2:13 hearing they discuss lab funding. At about 2:09, Siegfried Hecker, former director of Los Alamos, makes a pretty direct statement of degradation of scientific environment.

“When we went the direction of contractorization we made a grievous error pushing the laboratories in a direction that simply isn’t right for this country and we’ve suffered from that. The whole environment at these laboratories has changed.

Secondly, over the last… I would say now sixteen years, the regulatory environment at these laboratories has become so risk averse that we essentially can’t get work done anymore. In 1965 I came to Los Alamos as a young student because it was the best place to go work.

Unfortunately, these laboratories today are not the best places to go work anymore. And we need to make them such. And just more money doesn’t do the trick. We have to change the working environment to allow people to get their work done. These places nowadays look more like prisons than they do like university campuses or something in between, which is what we tried to make them. Attract the best, protect the most important. We’ve lost a sense of all that.

That’s one of the reasons why these laboratories are suffering today.

Mr. Chairman, when you say the system is broken, it’s broken in many different ways and we should fix it, I agree.

The issue, not yet obvious to congress, is that scientists are not fungible items. If the environment isn’t conducive to scientific careers and thinking, desirable people simply won’t come (or will leave quickly). It takes years to get expertise. If the stability needed to conduct a scientific career isn’t evident, not only won’t scientists hire on at the national laboratories, they may decide to ply careers in other areas. My older son, a sophomore in high school, looked at me in the middle of last week and said, “Dad, should I even bother taking physics?” I think that the answer is “yes”, but not necessarily to become a scientist.

In any case, I’ll be clear of the havoc, no longer having to fill out my funding between multiple divisions in increments of 0.2 or 0.3, each project in itself being over-promised to begin with. A decade of being stretched thin has left behind cumulative fatigue and the profound need for a recovery break. I know that I, once the fatigue lifts, can find resurrection of interest and reconstruction of places to apply my skills. The case for the national laboratories isn’t that clear; will they regain their balance or end up riding the failure cascade. If the U.S. can’t decide that they really are an important resource; if the management can’t be arranged to serve the science rather than vice versa, the answer will more likely be the cascade rather than the recovery. Such a failure could easily take a decade to reverse.

A failure cascade is a ‘tipping point.’ Once the point has been reached, failures by an organization cause stresses that lead to more failure, at an ever-increasing pace.”