Lab technologies take top honors
A revolutionary technique for discovering genes, an advance for marking
safety-critical parts and a new process for producing laser glass that
is 20 times faster than previous methods netted awards for Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory researchers.
The three teams of LLNL researchers, including two with industrial collaborators,
captured honors from the trade journal R&D Magazine as three of the
top 100 industrial inventions worldwide for 2000.
This year’s R&D 100 awards, nicknamed the "Oscars of invention,"
were presented last night at a black-tie dinner at the Chicago Museum
of Science and Industry.
The Laboratory has now captured 85 R&D 100 awards since 1978. This
year, Energy Department/NNSA labs won a total of 23 R&D 100 plaques.
"We are exceedingly pleased by our continued success in the R&D
100 judging for top industrial inventions," said Jeff Wadsworth,
the Lab’s deputy director for Science and Technology. "These
advanced technologies benefit the nation and reflect the Laboratory’s
tradition of multidisciplinary teams working together."
Discovering genes faster
In the process of studying breast cancer, scientists in the Laboratory’s
Biology and Biotechnology Research Program hit upon a shortcut for discovering
genes in the chromosomes of any plant or animal genome.
The new technology, called Gene Recovery Microdissection, was invented
by biomedical scientists Allen Christian, Matthew Coleman and James Tucker.
"Genetic diseases frequently require genetic cures," Christian
explained. "Our Gene Recovery Microdissection method will make finding
the genetic causes of diseases much easier."
As an example, Christian pointed out that biomedical scientists don’t
know the cause of about 95 percent of breast cancer cases, adding the
new technique will ease efforts to learn the underlying genetic causes.
"As a mapping tool, this technique lets you know what genes are where
and how they’re being used — with many times less sequencing
than was previously needed," Christian said.
Derivatives of the technology could also be used to sequence bacteria
without growing those organisms in culture. "This advance would be
especially important for drug discovery, since more than 95 percent of
bacteria can’t be grown in culture and thus can’t be sequenced,"
Christian noted.
Marking safety-critical parts
LLNL laser scientists, led by Lloyd Hackel, collaborated with a New Jersey
firm, Metal Improvement Company Inc., to develop a way to permanently
mark safety-critical parts for airplanes, hip replacements or other uses.
Known as the Lasershot Marking System, the advance uses a high-intensity
Livermore laser and optics technology to imprint, with a single laser
pulse, a machine readable pattern that contains up to 100 times more information
than a bar code in the same space.
In effect, the Lasershot Marking System allows manufacturers to mark parts
that are important for safety without the danger of fatigue or stress-crack
corrosion induced by other marking methods.
For example, a recent study of 10 patients who underwent hip replacements
and experienced fatigue fracture of the implant, one as early as within
19 months, found the fractures started through identification characters
etched on the joint implant.
"In these cases, the disturbance of the surface caused by the marking
method directly led to the failure of the medical implants and the failures
would have been prevented by the Lasershot marking method," according
to Hackel.
In August, an array of test samples marked with the Lasershot technology
was launched into space aboard the Discovery space shuttle. The samples
were space walked out and attached to the exterior of the International
Space Station to evaluate the effects of exposure to the environment during
a year in space.
The laser marking system was developed by Livermore researchers C. Brent
Dane, Lloyd Hackel, John Honig, John Halpin and Hao-Lin Chen, as well
as Metal Improvement researchers Fritz Harris, Laurie Lane, James Daly
and James Harrison.
New laser glass process developed
Working in conjunction with researchers from Schott Glass Technologies
and Hoya Corporation USA, LLNL scientists have helped invent a novel continuous
melting process for producing high-quality laser glass.
Instead of manufacturing one piece of glass at a time, an assembly-line
production method has been developed to make meter-sized plates of laser
glass at a rate 20 times faster, five times less expensive and with two
to three times better optical quality than previous processes.
The neodymium-doped phosphate laser glass is being produced for two football-stadium-sized
laser facilities — the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, at LLNL,
and the Mega Joule Laser in France. Each laser system will require 3,000
to 4,000 meter-sized pieces of laser glass.
With the advance in laser glass production, it is now possible to build
high-energy, high-peak-power lasers, such as NIF, that would have been
impractical with old technologies.
The continuous laser glass melting process uses seven separate operations,
carried out in separate vessels that are interconnected, to convert high-purity,
powdered raw materials into a continuously moving strip of laser glass.
Livermore researchers who helped develop the technology are: physical
chemist Jack Campbell, materials scientist Tayyab Suratwala, chemical
engineer Chuck Thorsness and chemists Paul Ehrmann, Rusty Steele and Michael
Riley.