28
Oct2013
Wouldn’t it be nice if your name were a unique identifier and nobody else had the same name as you? Unfortunately, most of us share our names with a number of other people, most of whom we have never met and never will. But we have all probably experienced the challenge and frustration of trying to find a specific person from a list of people with the same name. Remember when we used phone books? Trying to pick out the person you needed from a listing of multiple names? Actually, searching the internet doesn’t make this process any easier.
17
Oct2013
At the legendary 1987 American Physical Society conference, sometimes called the “Woodstock of physics”, thousands of physicists descended upon a New York Hilton ballroom to hear about the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity (HTS) in ceramic materials.
01
Oct2013
The Randolph-Sheppard Act was signed into law by President Roosevelt in 1936. The act established a priority for blind vendors on Federal property. Nearly 77 years later, walking toward the snack stand operated by a blind vendor, the irony always occurs to me as I read an unusual brass plaque on the hallway that commemorates the origin of the Human Genome Project and its champion, Dr. Charles DeLisi. The irony is that Rick, the blind vendor who could one day benefit from that project, cannot see the plaque.
It takes individuals with an almost futuristic vision, able to counter criticism by those with less foresight, to take leaps of faith to establish such a far-reaching effort such as the Human Genome Project. Dr. DeLisi was apparently such a person.
Dr. DeLisi, then Director of the Office of Health and Environmental Research at the Department of Energy, recognized the available technology and came up with the idea to sequence the human genome in 1985.
26
Sep2013
While I have not taken a formal survey, my experience over many years as a Department of Energy (DOE) employee suggest to me that most people have no idea what DOE does. Let me amend that. Many people know exactly what we do. DOE controls the price of gas at the pump; it manages natural gas drilling, builds pipe lines and regulates refineries. As it turns out, people know a great deal about DOE, it’s just that most of it is dead wrong.
Look it up and you’ll find that “[t]he mission of the Energy Department is to ensure America’s security and prosperity by addressing its energy, environmental and nuclear challenges through transformative science and technology solutions.” Hmm. Nothing about gas prices there.
Once you get a bead on the DOE mission you are ready to mine its extraordinary set of resources.
23
Sep2013
American Citizens Need Basic Research
Some time ago, a friend, a young father of two, lay in a hospital bed seriously ill. The physician said there was no treatment. The pancreas was secreting substances that were digesting itself and destroying surrounding tissue. Some patients recover on their own; others do not.
Natural laws may allow some remedy which will assist the body's own defenses and cause the pancreas to heal. If there was such a remedy, why did the physician not use it? The answer is the lack of knowledge -- not of just one physician, but of the medical profession as a whole. Unless the physician is a researcher, he waits for others to discover the remedy. He waits because no predecessor mastered the natural laws which govern the pancreas.
The young father in my story is a real person. His name is Vince Dattoria.
