The Lab Turns 80

The Laboratory celebrated its 80th anniversary this year. Founded in 1943 as a highly secret wartime effort with the singular goal of creating the atomic bomb, the Lab has grown in both scope and scale over the past eight decades, now employing roughly 17,000 people across more than 100 divisions. 

The culture of excellence fostered during the wartime Manhattan Project now underpins the way the Lab approaches modern national security issues of no less urgency: energy, climate, disease, natural disasters, and human health. This summer, John Sarrao, Deputy Laboratory Director for Science, Technology, and Engineering (STE) for the past five years, accepted a position as Director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Before he left, 1663’s editor sat down with him to get his perspective on the past, present, and future of STE at Los Alamos.

1663:  Over the past 80 years, the Lab has evolved from a nuclear weapons laboratory to the national security science laboratory that it is today. Can you speak to the role and importance of STE in the original effort and the current role of STE in our national security science mission? 

JS:  We’ve always had a national security mission. It was more nuclear-weapons-centric in the beginning; now the threat-space has gotten more complicated, so that mission is broader. The piece that has evolved is the nature of the national security mission, because the threats have evolved. Our STE work goes hand in hand with that. Whether the challenge is to build the first nuclear weapon or to deal with cyberthreats or biothreats, national security challenges go hand in hand with world-leading STE. I would say that actually has not changed in the last 80 years. It’s just the nature of the science, technology, and engineering that we do.

1663:  Much of the STE we do today has its origins in the Lab’s early years. What are some examples of modern STE programs with weapons-based beginnings? 

JS:  Going back to the Manhattan Project: we had to do fundamental physics, we had to do materials research, and we had to do computing. Now fast-forward 80 years: we’re still doing fundamental physics, we’re still doing materials research, and we’re still doing computing. 

At the next level down, within each of those, it’s a lot different now than it was 80 years ago. In the beginning, fundamental physics was defining the frontiers of nuclear physics, in a way that we could take the first observation of fission and actually make it actionable in what became the Trinity test and the first nuclear weapons. Similarly, in materials research, understanding how we could take the small amount of plutonium that existed and machine it into a useful form—that was a key question. And then there’s computing, which was done by people back then; now it’s done by machines. Your smartphone has as much computing power as the computers we used in the ‘70s and ‘80s to validate the current stockpile. 

Physics, materials, and computing are three of the six capability pillars that define our STE strategy today. Those three threads have been with us since the beginning, and their trajectories are still the same.

1663:  Alternatively, I’m sure we have introduced entirely new capabilities as science and technology have evolved. What is an example of a Lab capability with STE foundations that is central to our mission yet could not have been imagined as such when the Lab was first founded?

JS:  There probably is very little that wasn’t even imagined—how could we even know? But I think there have been a few surprises. We have an intelligence mission today that we didn’t imagine at that scale. Although, we were active in intelligence from at least the end of the Manhattan Project, when we were trying to understand, for example, what the Germans were doing. So, intelligence is something that looks a lot different now than it did back then.

We also have a pretty significant biology footprint today that probably wasn’t imagined during the Manhattan Project. But even then we were quite serious about understanding the human health effects of radiation. You can trace an arc of biology from the Manhattan Project to today but it’s probably differentiated more than expected.

Thirdly, I would say space. We were certainly active in space by the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, especially for doing test verification and monitoring what people were doing, but the way it has played out—I mean, I don’t think anybody during the Manhattan Project imagined that we, Los Alamos, would have rovers on Mars. 

1663:  How does STE fit into the weapons and pit production mission today at the Laboratory, and how does STE benefit from this relationship?

JS:  I think I’d frame it a little bit differently and say the fact that we have a mission that has deliverables—and that certainly includes the pit production mission, where we can do all the plutonium science we want, but if we don’t deliver 30 pits a year then we have not succeeded—I think causes us to do better science. There are people who think that the pit production mission is taking all the air out of the room and that it’s not good for STE. I don’t agree. My own most significant personal research in plutonium superconductors was done the last time we built pits, back in the early 2000s. And it wasn’t an impediment at all, it was actually a synergy because the focus on the plutonium materials questions, the equipment, the facilities, the people we had here because of our focus on pit production, actually allowed us to make some pretty groundbreaking scientific discoveries. So, done right, I think they go hand in hand.

1663:  Though the Lab’s mission—to solve national security challenges through simultaneous excellence—hasn’t changed over the years, the landscape of national security has. In January of this year, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock up to 90 seconds before midnight, declaring that now is a time of unprecedented danger. Humanity is grappling with a still-simmering pandemic, a rapidly changing climate, vanishing species, raging wars, and declining democracy. Superpowers are rattling their sabers with renewed vigor and new technologies are on the verge of reshaping the world as we know it. Having been the head of STE at a national lab for the past five years, what do you see is the role of Los Alamos STE in addressing these national and global challenges? 

JS:  While I would hope that we are as committed to simultaneous excellence today as we were in the past, I think arguably we weren’t as committed in the past as we are today. So I think there’s actually—even from a science, technology and engineering perspective—a greater need to focus on simultaneous excellence. The way we say it in the Lab’s culture statement is: “How we do our work is as important as what we do.” 

Now, do we have a history of celebrating people who did heroic things and took liberties with how they treated people or how they followed safety rules? We do. That’s not a satisfactory place to be, so I think we have to up our standards in how we really are simultaneously excellent. In the past, we, the United States, could do whatever we wanted and were the unassailable world leader. That is much less true today. So if we’re going to take on the diverse challenges, the diverse threats, we need to be better partners with our international allies and like-minded colleagues and also with our own staff. That’s not a very scientific answer, but I think it’s actually a pretty core part of how we do the STE we do.

1663:  As Deputy Director, what have been your top priorities for Los Alamos STE, and why? 

JS:  Something that the last couple years have taught us is that we need to anticipate unknown unknowns. That means we need to be broad and not focus too narrowly on things we think we understand. As we’ve already talked about, the Lab has had a biology program since the Manhattan Project began looking at the health effects of radiation. During my time here, I can’t tell you how many people have come to me and said, “Why do we have a biology division, why don’t we get rid of it?” But now, sitting here post-COVID, nobody is complaining about the biology program anymore. It’s awfully great that we have it and we kept it. It’s an example of a capability we needed to sustain—we weren’t quite sure how it was going to play out, but it served us pretty well in the last couple years. 

I’m not smart enough to pick a specific topic and say, “This thing is going to be the challenge of 2030, let’s focus the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program totally on that.” I wish I was. I wish I could have said, back in 2015, “We’re going to have a coronavirus disease break out in the following way, so structural biology expertise and coronavirus expertise are going to be key, let’s double down on that.” But I’m not that good and I don’t think anybody is that good. Instead, having a breadth of space where lots of things are flourishing, so that when a problem pops up, we actually have some resident nascent expertise, I think that’s the trick.

1663:  You started at the Lab in 1990, as a student. Can you summarize your path from student to Deputy Director? What was it about this place that got your attention, that got you excited, that kept you here? 

JS:  As a student, what was exciting to me was that there was a breadth of opportunity and a diversity of problems to work on. Most graduate students are one of ten students working for one professor. There’s nothing wrong with that model, but here, I was one graduate student working with ten staff members, so I got my Ph.D. done in a third of the time of most of my grad school classmates. I worked on resonant ultrasound spectroscopy with Albert Migliori, while also working on materials discovery. I was able to work on three or four different things, all in a pretty flexible way, and to me that was attractive.

The multidisciplinary nature of the work here and the emphasis on teaming also suited me. It led naturally to a lot of collaboration—on the papers I’ve written, I have relatively more coauthors than some people do—which maybe is an indicator for becoming a manager. I relatively quickly became the group leader of the group that I worked in. Over a five- or so year period, I went from being an individual contributor to ultimately a division leader in materials. That chance to be more inclusive, build teams, and enable the success of others came naturally. 

Then I made a pretty hard pivot: I went from leading something that I knew something about to leading something that I knew nothing about when I became the Associate Laboratory Director for Simulation and Computing. I knew exactly nothing about the science of simulation and computation; I’m an experimental materials researcher. But I think it’s a strength of the Laboratory that you can go from working in some esoteric area of materials research one day, to leading or participating in some computer science organization the next day. There aren’t many places where you can do that and be successful. So, I think the ability to have multiple careers in one laboratory is also an attractor. Given that I had moved around the Laboratory in a couple different ways, I apparently was competent enough and I had that breadth of experience, which paved a relatively natural path to being a deputy director. Because, again, I can’t be an expert in all the things that I’m responsible for. It really is about leadership and teaming and trusting people, rather than saying, “I’m the smartest person in chemistry and the smartest person in space and the smartest person in nuclear engineering.” That’s just not possible. You have to have that proclivity for team building and integration.

1663:  Having been a student here and now as the deputy director for STE, you’ve seen the Lab evolve and grow. The Lab—and the world—are probably quite different from when you started. What advice would you offer a student or postdoc looking into a career in STE at today’s Laboratory? What responsibility do you, as a Lab leader, have toward the next generation of employees? 

JS:  When you’re a student, you’ve got a pretty narrow and linear objective, which is: how do I finish my degree and how do I get my next job? That’s understandable. The advice I give students today is: Embrace the diversity of the Laboratory. Go to talks on topics you know nothing about. Meet people who work in fields that seem totally unrelated, because you have the opportunity to learn different stuff here, and it’s a really important thing to do. I will say in retrospect, as a student here, I did not sample the breadth of the Laboratory as well as I could have. But I think a big part of my role as Deputy Director for STE has been to enable that. I’ve told mentors,“It really is OK if somebody skips out for an hour to go to a talk that has nothing to do with their project—it’s part of their broader education here.”

The other part is that we, as Lab leaders, have to make sure that all of our students and all of our postdocs have the opportunity to express themselves and figure out what they want to do. Which means both helping them, but also giving them the freedom to explore things and make mistakes because that’s how they learn. If we’re not making mistakes and we’re not being surprised, we’re not discovering anything. We certainly don’t want to be reckless, so how to create a relatively safe space, to try some stuff in that space, I think that’s the trick.

Embrace the diversity of the Laboratory. Go to talks on topics you know nothing about, meet people in fields totally unrelated to yours.

1663:  You’re leaving Los Alamos shortly, after 33 years here. When you look back on your time here, and think about the future of STE at the Lab, are you optimistic about that future? Do you have concerns? 

JS:  My crystal ball is far too cloudy to say exactly where things are going. I think the approach to science that the Laboratory has, which is trying to solve big problems in a team-based way with expertise that’s interdisciplinary, I think that’s invariant. What exactly those problems will be, what exactly the frontiers of research are, I don’t know—that’s why we need to balance being both broad and deep simultaneously. 

I am optimistic about the future of STE at the Lab, and it’s because of the people. The Lab is growing massively—I used to be the average age of Lab employees; that’s not true anymore. There are an awful lot of really smart young people. All you have to do is walk around the Laboratory in the summer and you’ll find thousands of really smart, really excited people here, so that’s fundamentally optimistic and that’s the most important thing. 

The challenge is the combination of making everything near-term—we’ve got to solve the urgent problems we have—while also focusing on the long term. We have to do both or we’re not going to get from here to there. I think that’s the biggest risk, and it’s part of the simultaneous excellence of balancing near-term mission delivery with long-term science, technology, and engineering. That’s the part we have to get right. If we can get that right, and if we can create a space where our people feel included and comfortable and have the room to do good work, I think the Lab will be just fine.