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Sunday, September 19, 1999
National labs look beyond tomorrow
By Ian Hoffman
Journal Staff Writer
Trinity's mushroom cloud heralded a new age: Scientists in New Mexico had unleashed the most lethal force on Earth and forever changed the nature of war and global relations -- but they arguably made total world war unthinkable for the first time in history.
Biology and computer technology lie at a similar crossroads today. They possess astonishing power to pry at the essence of life, to meld man and machine. Yet they also could expose our deepest frailties.
New Mexico scientists are eyeing those frontiers. And its two national labs, Sandia and Los Alamos, possess unique tools for exploring and even mastering them.
Envisioned is an electronic oracle that will hash global problems at lightning speed. Computers will delve into global warming, overpopulation, urban sprawl, spread of the common flu or a biological warfare agent -- and then give prescriptions and describe alternative futures.
"Until now, we've used machines on their own terms," said Los Alamos nuclear-weapons chief Steve Younger. Soon, "we will talk with computers, and they will talk to us -- in our language, not theirs. The machine will say, 'I have something interesting. Would you like to see it?' And it will show it to you."
New Mexico scientists envision battles where the eyes and ears of commanders are tiny smart drones, trading data and acting as one, mimicking a body. They will signal bombers that the third vehicle in a convoy is full of civilians, the fourth a tank to be targeted with precision weapons.
"It's integrated-systems thinking, and we haven't put together integrated systems for war-fighting or peacemaking," said Sandia scientist Gerold Yonas, head of the labs' Advanced Concepts Group. "War is not just guns and tanks. It's psychology and behavior and refugees flowing over your enemy's border."
Scientists will bathe human DNA and proteins in subatomic particles and, discovering the world within, re-create its beneficial products with "designer" proteins and enzymes.
Greg Canavan, a defense science theorist at Los Alamos, wouldn't stop there: The 21st century will join man, mind and machine as never before. Canavan's calculations show that his personality, his intellect and those of his wife could in theory be stored on a computer chip, a kind of cyber-immortality.
Here is where the future of the national labs in New Mexico lies -- in putting supercomputers to work on humankind's most unwieldy problems. They will blend chemistry and physics to push the envelope of microbiology and attack a new breed of security problems, like disease epidemics or environmental degradation.
In fact, microbiology is the basis of a new arms race, one far more complicated than a Cold War nuclear standoff between two superpowers. At present, the United States is vulnerable to biological attack and might be unable to identify its attackers for reprisal. The weapons labs are working on reliable hand-held detectors to hunt for manmade viruses and bacteria. Eventually, researchers hope, scientists can take a stab at making biological warfare obsolete.
Weapons foremost
But smart money says nuclear weapons will remain the heart and soul of the labs for the foreseeable future -- unless diplomacy or future high-tech defenses persuade all military forces and terrorist groups to dispense with their deadliest arms.
"The genie can never be put back in the bottle," said astrophysicist William H. Press, who as the second-in-command at Los Alamos National Laboratory is responsible for foreseeing the lab's future.
"We do a lot of things," said Younger, head of the lab's nuclear-weapons directorate, "but what we are is a nuclear-weapons laboratory. And I think we will continue to be."
Nuclear-weapons research gave lab scientists command of the first- and third-fastest computers on Earth. Scientists' task today is finessing millions of lines of computer code and data to perform full three-dimensional "virtual nuclear testing."
Congress already has promised the next three generations of these supercomputers to the weapons labs, giving them machines up to 20 times faster. Odds are good the labs' machines will continue to outpace the world in computational power into at least the first decades of the next century.
Younger said he thinks U.S. weaponeers are on an endless journey. They will peer deeper into what makes hydrogen bombs, hunting and solving new questions ad infinitum.
"When is art done? When is medicine done? Or literature?" Younger asked. "It is never done. You are always learning more."
Not everyone agrees: Vic Reis, former head of all nuclear-weapons research for the U.S. Department of Energy, figures that with enough money, scientists will know all they really need to know about today's nuclear weapons by 2015.
Computer modeling
"There's no question large-scale modeling and simulation will drive decision-making. The world will be very complex and very interdependent, and we have to find tools to deal with this complexity," said Sandia's Yonas, former chief scientist of the Strategic Defense Initiative.
"We're sort of the slow, chemical-biological component of this. And in 20, 30, 40 years, we'll be out of the loop," said Andy White, head of Los Alamos' Delphi project. His job: Make Los Alamos the world leader for computer modeling and simulation. In essence, this means feeding machines with mankind's big problems -- like feeding, sheltering and keeping warm billions of humans without wrecking the planet, or predicting hurricanes before they form. These problems are so complex they are unsolvable by human minds, which cannot calculate answers as quickly as computers can and perhaps not in time to avert crises -- to evacuate people before a hurricane hits or inoculate them to thwart an epidemic.
"We just can't afford to wait," White said.
A lethal contagion can soar on jet wings across the globe in hours. Computer-driven markets can collapse virtually overnight. In decades, greenhouse gases could envelope the Earth to spawn extreme climate swings,.
"The time scales are changing, and at some level you don't have a choice," said Klaus S. Lackner, a scientist in the lab's strategic and supporting research directorate. "The time for you to make a decision is simply not there: You either trust the computer, or you don't play."
Looking deep inside
Scientists fire neutrons into human tissues. Other scientists pry apart and multiply DNA, and yet others probe cells with microscopic magnetic waves. All are using the tools of nuclear-weapons physics and chemistry to open new windows in molecular biology. This is one place Los Alamos and Sandia are heading in the next few decades.
Their scientists are probing the body's most fundamental structures -- for example, that DNA commands amino acids to build proteins and the proteins to twist and curl.
Taking a step further, lab scientists engage in odd artistry: They "paint" amino acids, the basic building blocks of cells and biological processes. They do this by swapping elements of amino acids -- carbon, nitrogen, oxygen -- with radioactive flavors of the same elements. They watch what the amino acids do, what proteins and enzymes they form, then what those do.
The global campaign to map the human genome will generate a huge library, but it's essentially nonsensical: Billions of combinations of four letters, representing the nucleotides that make up human DNA. Absent is what they mean, what they command the body to do.
Learning their function is the grail of molecular biology.
If scientists can link these genetic commands to biological structure and function, then they hope to copy nature and create their own proteins and enzymes.
"In the next few decades, we're going to see what these little guys are doing. Then we can start doing designer enzymes and proteins," said LANL's Canavan. "And that's when you become the master at the microlevel. ... We're getting to the point where we can manipulate things at the level of life itself, at the molecular and atomic level."
Scientists could not merely detect diseases more quickly: They might crowd the docking bays on human cells so microbes fail their attack. Or alter the human gene to erase defects or mutations before they occur.
"It's one of the important questions," said Los Alamos deputy director Press. "Can the world get out in front of the kinds of things a high-school student will be able to do in 20 years and prevent it before that student exists?"
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