The National Laboratories

The national laboratory system was invented in wartime. To build the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project created secret research centers at Los Alamos in New Mexico, Oak Ridge in Tennessee, and the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago that became Argonne, each run not by the government but by a university or company under contract. After the war the arrangement was kept and expanded under the Atomic Energy Commission. The labs passed to the Department of Energy in 1977, which now owns seventeen of them.

The labs operate under a model unique to American science: the government owns the land, buildings, and equipment, while a university, nonprofit, or corporate consortium manages each lab under a contract that is periodically rebid. Three, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia, are primarily nuclear weapons laboratories under the National Nuclear Security Administration. Ten are run by the Office of Science and house the large instruments, particle accelerators, light sources, neutron sources, and supercomputers, that university scientists from around the world apply to use. The rest focus on applied energy research, nuclear reactors, and environmental cleanup.

Together the laboratories employ about 70,000 people and spend more than 25 billion dollars a year. Their record includes the first nuclear reactor, the discovery of numerous elements and subatomic particles, the Human Genome Project's origins, the lithium-ion battery chemistry used in modern electric cars, and machines that have repeatedly held the title of the world's fastest supercomputer. They also conduct classified work for the intelligence community and the military, and they partner with companies through cooperative research agreements.

The labs face recurring questions about cost, security, and mission. Contractors have been fired after safety and security lapses, most notably at Los Alamos. Critics argue the system is too large and that some labs drift into work unrelated to their missions. Defenders point to capabilities no university or company could fund on its own. The labs have become central to the artificial intelligence race, where their supercomputers and scientific data give the government its own platform, and to the modernization of the nuclear stockpile.