Welcome to The Business of Government Hour, a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business.

The Business of Government Hour is produced by The IBM Center for The Business of Government, which was created in 1998 to encourage discussion and research into new approaches to improving government effectiveness. You can find out more about The Center by visiting us on the web at businessofgovernment.org.

And now, The Business of Government Hour.

Mr. Morales: Good morning. I'm Albert Morales, your host, and managing partner of The IBM Center for The Business of Government.

The U.S. Department of Energy has a rich and diverse history, with its lineage tracing back to the Manhattan Project. Today, DOE stands at the forefront of helping this nation meet its energy, scientific, environmental and national security goal of developing and deploying new energy technologies, and reducing our dependence on foreign energy sources.

The success of such a critical mission rests on DOE's pursuit of basic scientific research. With us this morning to discuss the Department of Energy's science and research efforts is Dr. Raymond Orbach, Under Secretary for Science and Director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Good morning, Ray.

Dr. Orbach: Good morning, Al.

Mr. Morales: And joining us in our conversation is Steve Sieke, IBM's Federal Civilian Industry Leader.

Good morning, Steve.

Mr. Sieke: Good morning, Al.

Mr. Morales: Ray, let's start off by learning a bit more about the Department. Many of our listeners are generally familiar with the Department of Energy, but perhaps you could give us an overview of its history and its current mission.

Dr. Orbach: The Department has a rich and varied history. It began really with the Manhattan Project, which was the origin of our nuclear weapons program. Early in the 1940s, it was clear that it was possible to design a weapon of magnitude that the Earth had never seen before.

And in the heat of World War II, the country decided to work assiduously in that direction. It put together a team of outstanding scientists and engineers and people from the military who formed the nucleus for the project to produce what became the atomic bomb.

After World War II, that was a very special set of expertise that the United States wanted to preserve at the beginning of the Cold War, so the Atomic Energy Commission continued, ultimately reaching its peak with the production of the hydrogen bomb.

It was in the '50s when President Eisenhower noted that it was also possible to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. And so he created a new organization, which included both the weapons components, but also peaceful uses of nuclear energy, what we now refer to as nuclear reactors. And so we began a parallel path of both weaponry and nuclear energy. The Department was then renamed. It became the Department of Energy, and the supervision of the nuclear energy component of the Department was handed to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

So part of the subsequent enterprise that followed the Atomic Energy Commission was spun off into what we now call the NRC, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, while the remainder remained with the Department of Energy.

In addition, a number of other programs, especially with regard to peaceful uses of atomic energy, with regard to fossil energy, with regard to other energy issues, were incorporated into the Department.

What you see today is a combination of all of those. We are responsible for the national security, as you pointed out at the beginning. But we're also responsible for energy security, and that is for doing the basic and applied research that will give us the stability of energy sources.

Mr. Morales: That's a very broad and critical mission. Perhaps you can give us a sense of the scale of the operations at the Department. Can you tell us a bit about the size, the overall budget, and the number of employees?

Dr. Orbach: We have, if you count the employees in our laboratories, we have roughly 100,000 scientists, engineers, and staff who are supported by the Department of Energy. Our budget is in the vicinity of $24 billion a year, of which, very roughly speaking, a little less than a half is devoted to nuclear security, to what we call the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA. About $7 billion of that total is also used to, frankly, clean up some of the problems that were created by the Manhattan Project and its successors.

And then the Office of Science would be third in line, with a budget of around $4 billion. And our job is to do the basic research that underpins the Department's missions, all of the missions.

Then you have about $3 billion, which is split into what would call the applied technology areas, the ones associated with coal, with oil and gas, and renewable energy and energy efficiency, with electrical energy transmission and so on.

Mr. Sieke: Now that you've provided us a sense of the Department, Ray, could you tell us more about your specific role. What are the responsibilities and duties under your purview, and how is the DOE Office of Science organized, and tell us a little bit about the size of your staff and budget.

Dr. Orbach: The Office of Science is the largest supporter of the physical sciences in the United States. Physical sciences include mathematics, physics, chemistry, geophysics. It represents about 43 percent of all of the federal support that goes towards basic research in those areas. So we're a major player. We are roughly three times the size of the National Science Foundation in terms of budget for those purposes.

The Department Office of Science is headed by a director, and I've had the privilege of being director since 2002. We divide ourselves into six areas, and a lot of what we do is really the sole U.S. government support for those fields.

For example, we are by far the major supporter of high energy physics research and of nuclear physics research. We also are responsible for catalysis research, which may surprise people. We have a basic energy sciences division, which looks at the applications and basic research in the physical sciences, including nanotechnology and the new frontier areas.

We have a biology and environmental research program. It was the Department of Energy in that particular program that began the human genome program back in the mid-'80s. Then we have a program that focuses on high-end computation. This is an area that I believe the Office of Science has turned into a major United States effort. We now have the fastest computers in the world that are open for scientific research.

And then, in combination with these programs, we have a program in what we call workforce development, which looks to the support for young scientists, for students interested in the sciences. And finally, we have the fusion energy sciences, which is a separate division, looking at a form of energy which we believe will ultimately solve the Earth's energy needs.

Mr. Sieke: So let me ask you -- it's clear that the Office of Science is playing a significant role in science in this country, but regarding your responsibilities and duties, what would you see are the three most significant challenges that you face in your position, and how have you addressed those challenges?

Dr. Orbach: Well, I have two positions, so I have to say something different about each, because in 2005, the Energy Policy Act created the position of Under Secretary for Science, and I hold that position as well.

That position is the chief scientific advisor to the Secretary of Energy, and I have the responsibility in that position for all of the Department of Energy programs. I have the responsibility of ensuring that they are based on the best science, and that we provide the scientific support that they need.

I have therefore been involved in the weapons program. I've been involved in carbon sequestration and capture. I've been involved in electrical distribution. It's really a wonderful assortment of responsibilities across the Department. I'm also responsible for the Office of Science, and I'm the guy that basically decides the budget. I make the decisions on where the money goes, and in what facilities we will invest in.

We are known for our very large-scale facilities. And the Office of Science is the one that builds the very large high energy physics machines, the nanotechnology centers, the synchrotron radiation light sources that are used now so extensively for biological structures, and the spillation neutron source, which is a new machine, just turned on last year at Oak Ridge.

In addition to these facilities, I also am in charge of the computation program for open science. That may not seem like a comparable enterprise to facilities, but in fact, the size of these new machines is sufficiently large that it's becoming a separate facility in and of itself, so all that is also part of the platter.

Finally, I have to look to the future, and I am the one on whose shoulders rest the decisions for priorities for investment in the sciences. Now this is not done by me standing by myself. I have a superb staff, and we also have the scientific community that advises us through our scientific advisory committees.

Mr. Morales: Could you tell us a little bit about your career path? Tell us about how you got started in academia and how you've migrated over to the federal government.

Dr. Orbach: I've had quite a long a long history in academia. I did my research work at Oxford as a post-doc. And then I came to Harvard as an assistant professor; spent a few years there and then the lure of California, where I come from, was very great, and I joined the faculty at UCLA. There, I filled a number of scientific and also administrative positions, and after 20 years was appointed as the first provost of the College of Letters and Science at UCLA.

It's a large institution, so I grew up learning about administration in real time, as I grappled with curriculum and students and their needs during that decade.

I was then asked to become chancellor of the University of California at Riverside, where I spent the next 10 years. So my experience in the University of California has lasted almost 40 years. Well, 40 years is a long time to be with a single institution, and so I retired in the beginning of 2002, and simultaneous with that, President Bush invited me to serve as the Director of the Office of Science.

And on March 14th of 2002, I was confirmed by the United States Senate for that position, and sworn in soon thereafter.

Mr. Morales: That's just fantastic. I only have another minute left, but I'm curious, how have all of these experiences as a scientist, in academia, and now as a public servant prepared you for the current leadership role that you hold today? And how has it informed your management approach?

Dr. Orbach: It's primarily working with people over these many years that has been the greatest asset. I have enormous respect for our scientific community and for students who are grappling with the difficult problems that they face, both in terms of their personal lives and also their career paths. And I think it's the attention to individuals and their needs that has been the best part of my background.

I also am a stickler for excellence. I want the United States to be at the forefront of scientific research, and I expect that out of both my staff and students and faculty. And so it's a combination of those two that has given me the strength and direction that I've used in my administration.

Mr. Morales: That's fantastic.

What is the Department of Energy's transformational science agenda? We will ask Dr. Raymond Orbach, Under Secretary for Science and Director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Dr. Ray Orbach, Under Secretary for Science, and Director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Also joining us in our conversation is Steve Sieke, Federal Civilian Industry Leader at IBM.

Mr. Morales: Ray, some have observed that given the complexity of future challenges, what is really needed are transformational discoveries and truly disruptive technologies.

Would you define for us what is meant by transformational science, and to what extent is this type of science vital to our future?

Dr. Orbach: We are looking at an energy crisis. We have learned that energy is limited; that its sources for us are unstable. And we need new sources of energy if we are going to survive as a nation, sources that are environmentally benign and abundant. When you say that, the first thing that comes to mind is what and how? And that's what we mean by disruptive technologies. We mean technologies that are not incremental, that don't simply add a little bit to what we already have, but are truly path-breaking.

We have a phrase. It's somewhat corny, but it's not altogether incorrect, and that is electricity was not invented by perfecting the candle. That's the situation that we're in now.

If you look at lighting, for example, the lights in this room are about five percent efficient. We lose 95 percent of the energy for these lights due to heat that frankly, we don't want. The best that you can do with fluorescents is about 20 percent. But all of these objects have the same vehicle, namely electrons or heat providing the light that we use.

What if we could generate light without heat? Think of the efficiency. It's a completely new direction, but in fact, it's a very possible direction. And those are what we call light emitting diodes. It's a completely different technology than that which provides our incandescent bulbs or our fluorescent bulbs. And it has the capability of being 100 percent efficient, because it's a direct conversion of electric current to light. That's a perfect example of what I have in mind, namely something that has no relationship to what's already present, but has the potential of providing efficiency and benign environmental effects, and therefore adding to our energy capability.

There are many other areas that one can point to. I can think immediately of biofuels, where today's conventional approach is through corn, where we take the sugars and starch and convert them by fermentation to ethanol. But what about the rest of the plant? What about the plant fibers and the cellulose that gives the plant its nutritional pathways? We don't make any use of that, and we call that cellulosic ethanol; that is, the ability to produce fuel from the stalk of the plant, from the parts that we now throw away or use as fertilizers.

How do we do it? We don't know how to get past the cell walls, the so-called lignins, to get at the materials inside that we would like to break down into the sugars that we could then create fuel from. That's transformational. The current ways we have are either through heat or for chemicals that first of all waste energy, and also are not environmentally very friendly.

But I ask you to consider the termite. The termite, if you've ever had any, is a remarkable machine. It can take apart a piece of wood so fast that it's frightening. How does it do it? It doesn't use harsh chemicals and it doesn't use excess heat. It uses bacteria inside its hindgut that breaks down the cell walls and enables it to digest the cellulose that's inside the plant material. We have to figure out how nature does it.

So these are the kinds of changes that we're talking about, taking a different path, a different road that has tremendous potential. Also is risky. We may not be successful. But without it, we'll never get beyond the current limits that face us in the energy world.

Mr. Morales: That's certainly fascinating.

Now last year, the President announced a commitment to double the budget for basic research in the physical sciences at key agencies over the next 10 years to maintain U.S. leadership in science.

Could you tell us more about the American Competitiveness Initiative, the ACI, and the role of the Office of Science has in making it a success?

Dr. Orbach: It was a fabulous statement by our President. It was the first time I had heard any President talk about the physical sciences in those specific terms.

And as he laid out what he hoped to achieve with the ACI, I saw the Office of Science as a key element in that enterprise, and to be a part of the administration and to be able to carry out that agenda during my tenure as Director of the Office of Science was so exciting that it led to our commitment to provide the President with the results that he so generously was funding.

Mr. Sieke: Given the breadth and depth of the Office of Science's research portfolio, will you elaborate on your organizational restructuring project that's also known as the One SC Initiative? How did this initiative reduce layers of management and streamline decision-making, as well as making more efficient use of resources?

Dr. Orbach: When I looked at the Office of Science, when I first took over the directorship, I saw a hierarchical structure that first of all had many layers; but even worse, separated my office from our laboratories and the administration of our research grants at universities. I didn't want that separation. I didn't want what we called operation offices in between me and the researchers. And so we flattened our organization, and the One SC was our name for what has now become in fact an operational entity.

Right now, we have 10 national laboratories that report directly to the Office of Science Director. You know many of them. They are the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and so on. We have a presence at each of these laboratories through what we call our site offices. And those site office managers report directly to me. There's no intermediary; whereas before, they went through a hierarchical structure before it ever got to my office.

As a consequence, we have very direct reporting, and also a much more rapid response time. As things happen, we can provide resources and provide assistance on a very rapid scale; whereas before, we had to go through a series of intervening steps, some of which meant that the material never reached my desk.

So it's a responsive and efficient structure that I believe fulfills the President's management agenda.

Mr. Sieke: It's often said that science is based on two pillars, namely experiment and theory. Can you explain to our listeners to what extent high-end computation, especially through simulation, has become a true third pillar of scientific discovery? And can you also elaborate on how DOE's Advanced Scientific Computing Research, the ASCR program, is at the forefront of these advances?

Dr. Orbach: It's a complementary contribution. The idea is the following: one can produce theories about physical phenomena. Ultimately, they have to be verified by experiment. But what if the phenomena are so complex that there is no simple theory that's predictive?

What do you do then? Well, one thing you can do is a set of experiments. But then you have no way of describing what those experiments measured.

What we are finding through high-end computation is that we have enough power now -- and by the way, this is a relatively recent event -- to be able to simulate nature itself; that is, to take the various parts that nature has and make them do what nature does, but do it computationally so that we can literally twist the knobs and explore different phenomena and different regions of behavior. And from that, we can then predict, just as a theory would, the behavior of physical systems.

So you can think of computation, and especially simulation, as completely equivalent to the theoretical discoveries which closed form equations can provide, but in situations that are much too complex for us to be able to describe.

There's also a whole world out there for which there are no equations. We have random systems, systems that have no order, and which make theoretical predictions difficult, if not impossible. Through simulation, we can derive their properties, and they are very surprising. Nature has some real surprises for us. And so that combination of simulation and experiment to test the simulation are proving a triad of avenues towards discovery.

I should say one thing more: it's not just scientific discovery. It's also economic enhancement. We are finding more and more now that industry is beginning to use simulations to reduce time to market, to reduce development costs, as these machines become sufficiently powerful to meet their needs.

So you're seeing high-end computation both on the research side, but also on the very practical, on a purely economic side, that industry faces.

Mr. Sieke: Let me turn to another important initiative. What is the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program, the SCI-DAC? And more importantly, how does it coordinate investments across all of the Office of Science Mission areas?

Dr. Orbach: We call SCI-DAC an interdisciplinary approach. It's one thing to have a computer. It's another thing to make it work. And what SCI-DAC does is to bring together the scientist who wants to calculate something or simulate a particular phenomenon, and the people who know how the machine works -- the computer scientists, the applied mathematicians, the people who develop algorithms.

They form teams. And as teams, they can make the most effective use of the computational capabilities that we provide. Most scientists are much too impatient to actually explore machine dynamics and exactly how the computer works and how to optimize it. But that's what computer scientists and applied mathematicians do for a living.

By bringing them together, we can make more efficient the codes that the scientists develop, sometimes by factors of 10, sometimes 100 times faster. That means that problems that normally would be immense and no computer could solve suddenly become feasible on the computers that we have currently at hand. So SCI-DAC has proven to be a remarkable accomplishment of the Office of Science.

It also separates the United States from its foreign competitors. Very few countries have managed to bridge that interdisciplinary gap. It gives the United States leadership over any other country in the world in terms of use of high-end computation.

Mr. Morales: Ray, earlier you talked to us a little bit about the research facilities that you manage. Could you elaborate on a plan called the Facilities for the Future of Science: A 20-Year Outlook? How does it answer the salient question of what facilities are needed for the next scientific discovery, and can you give us a sense of how you prioritize your efforts?

Dr. Orbach: That has turned out to be a wonderful example of the interaction between the Office of Science and the scientific world, and the wonderful advantage that the Director of the Office of Science has when it comes to setting science priorities.

When I first started as Director of the Office of Science, I was told by Congress and by the Administration you scientists want everything. All you want is this new machine or this new toy, as it sometimes is referred to. And you don't care about the cost. Why can't you prioritize? Well, of course, scientists have prioritized, but we have never prioritized across fields. We've prioritized within high-energy physics as to what kind of facilities we need. We've also prioritized within condensed matter physics. But no one had ever prioritized between high energy physics and condensed matter physics, or for that matter biology or other fields of science.

How in the world do you compare different branches of science when it comes to a budgetary prioritization? That was the challenge that was given to us in the early 2002 period by Congress, and by the Administration.

What we did was to define prioritization on the basis of scientific impact; that is, we charged our advisory committees to lay out their priorities for their particular field of science and give us a description of the science advantages that would then obtain if those facilities were to be built. We also asked them to give us an idea of when those facilities could be built. Some of them, for example, you didn't know what the technologies were, and so they were really in the future.

And over time, then, we had from each of the scientific communities a vision of their priorities for their field and the consequences of investment. Then, it was relatively straightforward to take on the basis of the consequences of the science investment a comparison between fields. We also had some budgetary stringency that we forced upon ourselves so that we weren't just asking for everything.

We took the authorization levels that Congress had indicated would be in the future for the Office of Science, and we took a look 20 years out, using more or less the index of inflation, to give us an idea of what our budget would look like. We then fit underneath that envelope the basic costs associated with research and with administration and so on, and what was left was for facilities. That reduced the number of facilities, which initially were over 50, down to 28, and also gave us a time scale for when we should invest in what facility.

And that was issued in November of 2003. It has been remarkably robust. It has given us an approach to investment in terms of large-scale facilities, and we have just finished an update on where we're at now in 2007. We expect that it will show that the Office of Science has been vigilant in its commitment to quality and budget at the same time.

We have worked within budget. We've built our facilities according to budget and according to timescales that were predicted in the past. We've really used that prioritization for our operations.

I hope that this will give the Administration and Congress a sense of confidence in the Office of Science that we're worth the money that they invest in us, and that we can show that we can use it wisely and effectively.

Mr. Morales: What about the Department of Energy's Bioenergy Research Efforts?

We will ask Dr. Raymond Orbach, Under Secretary for Science and Director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Dr. Ray Orbach, Under Secretary for Science, and Director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Also joining us in our conversation is Steve Sieke, IBM's Federal Civilian Industry Leader.

Ray, the 21st century is already being called the Biological Century, an era when advances in biology will bring revolutionary and unconventional solutions to some of our most pressing challenges, and we've certainly begun to talk a little bit about that.

Could you elaborate on some of the key biological research contributions your office has made?

Dr. Orbach: It indeed is the era of biology, but you can't separate biology from the physical sciences. The human genome project was a triumph of the physical sciences. We were able to break down the DNA into little pieces, then reassemble them using computational methods in order to reconstruct the full human genome. The information we learned from that process is not lost upon us, and the Office of Science is now using the same techniques not for human health or behavior, but rather for energy.

We are now dealing with microbes that we can genetically engineer to do the jobs that we need to do in order to develop energy security for our country. I've already made reference to those microbes that are in the hindgut of the termite. We need to know what they do. What we've done is to sequence all 200 of them so we know their genomes. And now the trick, which is not so simple, is to figure out what are the metabolic pathways that those genomes conduct to enable the termite to get past the lignins to get at the cellulose.

That's an example of how we use biology for very practical purposes; in this case, producing fuel.

There's another aspect to it and that is I focused on the termite. But I haven't focused on the plant. Once we know their genome, would it be possible to decouple slightly the lignins from the cellulose and hemi-cellulose? That is, could we make it easier for our chemicals, microbes, whatever it is that we're using, to get past the cell wall and get down to the cellulose to break it into the sugars that we would then ferment into fuel?

See it works both ways. We can either go at it from the side of the microbes, or we can go at it from the direction of the plants. Clearly, we're going to do both.

But this is an example of how our energy future depends on the biological revolution of the 21st century.

Mr. Morales: This is fascinating. So continuing on the same theme, you mentioned earlier that DOE has been at the forefront of mapping the genome.

Could you elaborate on Energy's Genomes to Life, the program also known as GTL? What types of research will the bioenergy research centers conduct, and to what extent will these centers draw upon the broader GTL Program?

Dr. Orbach: The GTL Program is concerned, as you've indicated, with new fuels. It's also concerned with carbon sequestration. We know that microbes absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and then use it for their own metabolic purposes. Could we design microbes that would absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, from coal-fired power plants?

And then microbes also are remarkable in that they survive under incredible conditions. We have microbes that exist literally in radioactive environments. Could we use them to clean up some of our nuclear waste that is left over from the nuclear era?

So microbes, we believe, have a very large and complex and exciting prospect for dealing with issues that our country faces. That is what GTL is.

Now what we are focusing on through the bioenergy research centers is fuel. We need to figure out a way to produce energy and not pollute the environment. We need to make it carbon-free. We need to make it plentiful, and we need to make it cheap. And that's the purpose of the three bioenergy research centers. We are asking them to look at nature and see if we can do what nature does synthetically, and thereby produce energy.

But in sum, their job is to bring to the market products that will come from those transformational discoveries; that is, to create the disruptive technologies that will then change the nature of the marketplace. You can think of them as start-up companies. It's very interesting that the federal government is creating with its money three new start-up companies. And that's because all these areas that I've just outlined are much too risky for the private sector to invest in.

So the government is buying down the risk capital associated with these start-up companies. But ultimately, our aim is the same: we intend to get their disruptive technologies to the marketplace.

Mr. Sieke: Ray, another one of today's hot topics in scientific research is nanotechnology, where we're learning to manipulate matter at the molecular level and to probe the very structure of matter and the beginning of time.

Could you tell us about your office's efforts in nanotechnology, specifically about the work being performed by DOE's Nano Scale Science Research Centers?

Dr. Orbach: We decided that rather than small efforts at individual laboratories or universities, we would create centers that would attract scientists from all over the country to come and use facilities that no one could afford themselves. And so we built five Nano Science Centers that are of the order of $80 million to $90 million investment each.

They have within them the facilities and the structure to enable scientists to work at the atomic level and produce new materials.

But we didn't stop there. We put those facilities next to our light sources, next to our analytic structures, so that we could actually figure out what's going on as these new materials were being developed.

Nano scale science starts with the atom and builds up one atom at a time new structures, new materials that will do very exciting new things. But you have to characterize what it is you're growing. And so this is unique to the world. We have these very large-scale centers, co-located with our analytic facilities so that we will know what's been created and how we can best harness it for the purposes of our country.

Mr. Sieke: Well, let's move on to fusion power, which, as you know, has the potential to play a key role in U.S. long-term energy plants and independence.

And I've got two questions for you. First, what is fusion energy? And has your office placed an increased emphasis on its national burning plasma program? And second, what about your collaboration with international partners on the fusion project known as ETR?

Dr. Orbach: Fusion is the reason we're here. The sunshine gives us the energy that we use to stay alive. That energy comes from fusing hydrogen nuclei or protons together to form helium and heavier elements. The fusion process is one that gives us our energy and literally powers our universe.

It's very difficult. The sun is very big. And the gravitational forces keep the hydrogen and other elements under control inside the sun. The temperatures that they reach are in the hundreds of millions of degrees internal to the sun, and that's because the fusing of the hydrogen into helium means bringing two protons that are both positively charged together. And as you know, like charges repel.

And the only way we know how to do it and the only way nature knows how to do it is to get them moving so fast they just overcome that repulsion. So in order to do fusion, you have to have very high temperatures, and most often, you need some very simple nuclear material to fuse.

Now what we want to do is actually very similar to what I've just been talking about. We want to mimic nature. We want to do here on Earth what the sun does. Well, the small problem of creating 200 million degrees here on Earth and keeping something encapsulated at those temperatures means it's not simple. But the prospects are enormous. If we could fuse Deuterium and Tritium together -- those are both isotopes of hydrogen -- we could produce enough energy to satisfy the needs of this globe forever.

I'll be very specific. There's enough Deuterium in a body of water the size of Lake Erie to fuel the energy needs of this Earth for 4,000 years. So that's the prize. That's what's out there. Unfortunately, we have to figure out how to mimic the sun, and that's what ETR is.

ETR will be the first controlled burning plasma ever created on Earth by man.

Now having said that, how do you do it? And what you do is you try to try to trap the Deuterium and the Tritium in a magnetic field so they can't hit the sides of the vessel or the cell walls because at those temperatures, they just melt any material we know of. And so we use magnetic confinement or something called the Tocamac (?). Without going into the details, let me just say that over half the world's population are represented by the seven governments that have come together to try and do a burning plasma experiment here on earth. They represent the Russian Federation, China, India, South Korea, Japan, the United States, and the European Union.

This is the first truly international large-scale basic research program in the history of the Earth.

On the one hand, it's very exciting. On the other hand, all seven parties have different sets of legal arrangements, do construction differently within their own scientific community. It has been a real struggle to find a common language amongst the seven of us. But the prize is what attracts us. If we can do it, and it will take decades before we know, we will be able to build power plants about the size of a conventional power plant that will use only Deuterium from sea water, and produce the Tritium from Lithium. And Lithium was here at the Big Bang. Lithium is all over our world.

So we use plentiful elements to produce energy. The only thing coming out at the end will be energy and helium gas. There's no other source of energy that is clean as that that I know of, and as plentiful.

So the stakes are enormous, but the problems are serious, and we're doing our best to try to overcome them.

Mr. Morales: Ray, you make a very complex process sound very simple. That's fantastic. So at the risk of going down to another complex process, I want to ask you a little bit about dark energy.

Your office has been underwriting research that seeks to solve the mystery of this thing called dark energy. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit more the concept of dark energy, and about the efforts of your high-energy physics program in this area?

Dr. Orbach: Well, first of all, we haven't a clue what dark energy is. And so I'm not going to provide you an answer to that question. And it's one of these wonderful examples where, with a certain amount of hubris, we think we know it all. And then nature comes along and slaps us in the face and says you got it backwards.

Think about the universe. We know the universe is expanding. Everybody knows that. Well, but it's also under the force of gravity, and so you would think eventually gravity would slow it down. And so scientists set out to see how much the expansion of the universe was slowing down due to gravity. And they looked at a particular source called a Type IA Super Nova. They didn't find too many, but they found enough, and their results a decade ago said exactly the opposite; that the universe was not slowing down. It was actually accelerating.

Well, clearly that was nonsense. Everybody knew that the universe was slowing down in its expansion, but of course, it wasn't nonsense. We were talking nonsense.

And this is the beauty of nature. You cannot tell it what to do. It will tell you how it behaves.

Now, in order for the universe to accelerate outward, as it appears to be doing, something has to provide the energy for that. And since we have no idea what it is, we call it dark energy. And it's not too different from sometimes medical diagnoses where people give a particular disease a name but have no idea how to cure it. We gave dark energy this name, but we have no idea what it is. We do know that it's almost three quarters of the energy budget of the universe. So whatever it is, it's big, and we haven't a clue what it is.

Mr. Morales: That's exciting. That sounds like an exciting frontier to investigate.

What is the Department of Energy's transformational science agenda?

We will ask Dr. Raymond Orbach, Under Secretary for Science and Director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, to share with us when the conversation about management continues on The Business of Government Hour.

Mr. Morales: Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm your host, Albert Morales, and this morning's conversation is with Dr. Ray Orbach, Under Secretary for Science, and Director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Also joining us in our conversation is Steve Sieke, IBM's Federal Civilian Industry Leader.

Ray, the Department of Energy has played a role in training America' scientists and engineers for more than 50 years. Could you elaborate on your efforts to build the scientific and technical workforce of the future, and to that end, what is the Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists Program, and to what extent does this program create a foundation for DOE's national labs?

Dr. Orbach: We believe that the future of our country -- its economy, its intellectual growth -- depends on scientific literacy in our county. It depends on young men and women choosing science as a career, and then having the ability to pursue their instincts in an unfettered fashion.

That's our goal. We use our resources as best we can to achieve that end.

We have 17 national laboratories that are run by the Department of Energy. They are contracted with the private sector who actually carries out the functions of those laboratories. But they are a repository of the very finest in basic and applied research in this country. We are sharing those resources with schools, with teachers, with students, encouraging them to become partners in the discovery process that basic science generates at these laboratories.

So for example, our workforce development program will bring middle school teachers to our laboratories for the summer. We'll pay them to come and join a research program. They will have a mentor. They will experience the excitement of discovery that takes place in those laboratories. We will then follow them when they go back to their classroom in the fall. We'll provide a modicum of funds that they can use for scientific equipment, for experiments for their students.

And then working with the National Science Foundation, we will bring their students the following year to our laboratories so they, too, can participate in discovery.

This is a three-year program, and you'll notice that we focus on the middle schools, and that's because study after study has convinced us that that's when we lose our students from science. In the elementary school, girls and boys do just as well as one another. But we see young women moving away from science in the middle school years, which are difficult years in the human development of both boys and girls. But it's a loss that our country can ill afford.

And so we're focusing on the most important period of intellectual growth for our youth, and hopefully can keep them involved and interested so that they will follow a scientific or technological career into high school, and then ultimately into college.

Mr. Sieke: Ray, it sounds like a great program to give us hope for the future of science. That's terrific.

Let me ask you this: As the Director of Office of Science and distinguished scientist yourself, what's your view of the fields that we might hope to see the most remarkable advances, both in the near term and in the long term?

Dr. Orbach: Those are the six areas that we put our money in. I want the science that the Office of Science funds and supports to be the best in the world. And it has to be the most exciting science that this world can generate. And so those are the criteria. And so you will find scientific discovery across the board, but not everywhere -- just in those six areas that I laid out before.

I believe that dark energy is probably the most important single unknown aspect of our universe. And we are going to find out, one way or another, what it is and what it tells us about our own future. We're going to go back to the origin of time to find out what caused the Big Bang. What was the Big Bang? What happened right at the moment of creation?

Those are the most exciting aspects in high energy physics to which one can refer. And they are of immense intellectual importance for all of us. In the nuclear area, we're interested in those funny things called quarks. What are they? Why can't we see them? Why are they always bound? There are fundamental questions about the nature, literally, of us, of the nuclei that make up our body that we don't understand.

In basic energy sciences, you're talking about complex systems, systems that are much too confusing for us to understand, but which are at the basis of life, which are at the basis of materials, which give us hope for the future in terms of an environment that is friendly.

In the biological world, we are looking at metabolic pathways, at the things that we take for granted in nature. Can we duplicate it?

In fusion, I've already talked about the excitement of discovery, of can we tame on Earth the forces that are around us and give us life through the Sun.

And finally, in advanced scientific computation, can we simulate? Can we figure out how these very complex materials work?

I should say something more. These machines are becoming so powerful that I believe we will see quantitative sociology, psychology, and humanities develop, where in the social science and humanities fields, scholars will ask questions that they've never asked before, and have an opportunity to understand how our civilization has developed in ways that have never been possible.

Underlying all of this are the new tools that we have available that give us opportunities that mankind has never had before, and in my view are the excitement behind the physical sciences.

Mr. Morales: Now, Ray, at the risk of putting you on the spot here, I'm going to quote you. You've been known to say that science provides much of our intellectual nourishment. The excitement of discovery persuades not only our psyche but our very language.

You've also said that science in the Office of Science is beautiful.

How important do you think these feelings of excitement and inspiration are?

Dr. Orbach: I think they're the essence of what drives us. If you think about art and you think about a painting, you're taught that your eye automatically gravitates to the upper right-hand corner, and so the artist then puts together his painting, his tableau, in such a way that your eye is drawn to that corner.

If it's not, you're troubled, and the artist can trouble you, by coming up with a painting that makes you feel uneasy.

Scientists do the same thing. Scientific discovery is not some set of equations that we know and we write down and we solve and eureka. Scientific discovery is coming up with something completely new. Quite often when we discover things, they're so complex and so cumbersome that we wonder whether they really are true or not. And scientists have a tendency to think that they have finally gotten the answer when it's beautiful, when it's simple, when suddenly they see that all of that complexity can be bottled up in a relatively simple expression or simple structure.

It's that aesthetic feeling of simplicity that drives discovery and makes one feel that you have created something.

I often say to young people how many fields in the world can you work in that you have a discovery that is yours; that no one can take away from you? You're the one that figured it out. And everybody else that comes along after knows that. That is so exciting. It's also terribly difficult. More often than not, it's very frustrating, where you keep going down wrong paths, and you know they're wrong, because in order to explain it, it's too complex. There's something wrong out there.

So it's that aesthetic sense of simplicity that I think is behind scientific discovery and which keeps us going. Just as exactly as an artist does when they describe their tableau

Mr. Morales: Dr. Orbach, you've had a very interesting and a highly successful vocation with the sciences, and as a public servant.

What advice would you give to someone who perhaps is thinking about a career in either the sciences or in public service, or perhaps in both?

Dr. Orbach: I view public service as a payback. My own career has been very generously supported by people through their taxes and by our federal government. I view the opportunity of coming to Washington and doing the best job I can as way of expressing my thanks to this country for the wonderful opportunities it has given me.

I would advise young people to get into discovery. It doesn't matter if it's the physical sciences, the mathematics, biological sciences, the science of discovery. It is so exciting, and it has with it a rigor and a process that they will find invaluable in other fields.

I would then ask them over time to think about payback, about giving this marvelous country of ours a return on its investment in us. That's the way I view federal service, state service, teaching, local service. Each of us expresses our thanks for the support our country has given us through these vehicles.

Mr. Morales: That's wonderful advice. Unfortunately, we have reached the end of our time this morning.

I want to thank you for fitting us into your busy schedule. Steve and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to research and our country.

Dr. Orbach: Well, thank you for the opportunity of expressing my views.

You can find out more about us at our website at www.science.doe.gov.

And I ask each of you in the listening audience to log in and see what the Office of Science does, and then hopefully join us in this pursuit that we believe is so important for our country.

Mr. Morales: Great. Thank you.

This has been The Business of Government Hour, featuring a conversation with Dr. Raymond Orbach, Under Secretary for Science, and Director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy.

My co-host has been Steve Sieke, Federal Civilian Industry Leader at IBM.

As you enjoy the rest of your day, please take time to remember the men and women of our armed and civil services abroad, who can't hear this morning's show on how we're improving their government, but who deserve our unconditional respect and support.

For The Business of Government Hour, I'm Albert Morales. Thank you for listening.

This has been The Business of Government Hour.

Be sure to join us every Saturday at 9:00 a.m., and visit us on the web at businessofgovernment.org. There, you can learn more about our programs and get a transcript of today's conversation.

Until next week, it's businessofgovernment.org.