From so simple a beginning…

The brilliant and tragic history of nuclear fusion

Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking
Charles Seife
Viking Adult, October 2008

Among all of humanity’s great quests to wrest control of nature and its own destiny, few quests have been as grand in scale and optimism as nuclear fusion. The fascinating history of nuclear fusion shows man’s relentless efforts to first understand and then gain power over the source of energy that makes the stars shine. This history has also been dotted with some of the most brilliant, colorful and tragic figures in scientific history. Most importantly, fusion also demonstrates the dangers and pitfalls inherent in trying to seize nature’s greatest secrets from her.

In this engaging and informative history, Charles Seife tells us the story of trying to put the sun in a bottle, the singular personalities which permeated this history, the monumental mistakes made in understanding and harnessing this awesome source, and the wishful thinking that has pervaded the dream ever since its conception. Seife who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from Princeton and is now a journalism professor at NYU does a great job of clearly explaining the science behind fusion, and sprinkles his narrative with wit and gripping human drama.

These days fusion is mostly associated with hydrogen bombs that can obliterate entire cities and populations. And yet its story begins with a quest to understand one of the oldest and most profound questions that man has pondered; what makes the sun shine? Quite early on, it was quickly recognized that chemical rections couldn’t sustain the tremendous power of the sun for so long. After many decades of efforts, it was the great physicist Hans Bethe who finally cracked the secret of the stars’ luminous glow. Bethe found out a set of reactions catalysed by carbon that achieved the transformation of four hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. This central mechanism was soon shown to underlie the production of energy in all so-called main sequence stars like the sun.

It was with the entry of the United States into the Second World War however, that a more sinister use for nuclear fusion was envisioned by the volatile, brilliant Hungarian physicist Edward Teller, a dark character whose shadow looms large over the history of fusion and nuclear weapons. Teller proposed setting off a then still conceptual atomic bomb to generate the immense temperatures of tens of millions of degrees at the center of the sun that would ignite and hopefully propagate a fusion reaction in deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen that would be easier to fuse compared to hydrogen itself. Achieving fusion is an enormously difficult endeavor; one has to overcome the intense repulsive barrier between nuclei that keeps them from approaching one other. Only temperatures of tens of millions of degrees can get these nuclei hot enough to fuse. And yet as Seife explains, there is a fundamental paradox here; the very temperatures that can overcome the repulsive barrier between nuclei also blow them apart. It seems that in achieving nuclear fusion, we are constantly working against ourselves.

The history of the US and Soviet thermonuclear weapons program has been well documented in other sources. I have a summary in my last post. Seife succintly enumerates this history and narrates the development of genocidal megaton yield hydrogen bombs which are now part of almost every nuclear arsenal.

It is however in life and not in death that fusion promises mankind eternal glory. Efforts to attain this glory bear the stamp of the quintessential Faustian bargain for knowledge, where men gambled their careers and reputations, not to mention billions of government dollars, in trying to secure their place in history and free mankind of the burden of energy sources.

These efforts, while they taught us a lot about the workings of nuclei and electrons, have been riddled with tall claims and monumental failures. Seife recounts one program after another starting in the early 1950s that promised working fusion reactors in about twenty years. In Argentina and Britain, in Russia and the United States, claims about fusion regularly appeared and were hungrily lapped up by the popular press until a few months later, when the premature optimism came crashing down in the light of further investigations. In the first UN conference organized to discuss peaceful uses for atomic energy, Indian physicist Homi Bhabha talked about fusion becoming the practical solution to all our energy needs in three decades. And yet, effort after effort exposed fundamental problems in the system, hideously recalcitrant barriers that nature seemed to have erected to thwart us in our quest. The barriers still seem insurmountable.

On one hand, grandiose schemes using hydrogen bombs to excavate harbors, to carve out canals, to analyze moon dust and to solve almost every conceivable problem were imagined by Edward Teller and his followers. None of them worked, and all of them would produce dangerous radioactive fallout. On the other hand, early on scientists recognized a basic mechanism for taming fusion; by keeping fusing deuterium or tritium nuclei confined within a magnetic field in an extremely hot plasma of electrons and nuclei. The field of plasma physics emerged. This is the famous inertial confinement approach for harnessing fusion. This approach was developed and tested throughout the 50s and 60s. Some schemes looked as if they were working. Later it was found that not only were they producing less energy than what went in, but sometimes fusion was not even taking place and the neutrons that are a signature of the process were coming from elsewhere. The first condition, a net gain of energy, is called breakeven and is a fundamental condition for any energy-generating source to be satisfied. You have got to get more energy than what you put in. Ever since then, fusion has been achieved on smaller scales, but breakeven has never been attained.

Apart from inertially confined plasma fusion, Seife also describes the second major approach called laser fusion, which gradually arose as a competitor to plasma fusion in the 1970s. In this process, intense lasers shine on a small pellet of a deuterium or tritium compound from many directions. In the center of the pellet where unearthly temperatures and pressures are achieved, fusion takes place. This approach has been pursued in many grand schemes. One is called Shiva and involves 20 laser beams from 20 different directions squeezing a fusile pellet. The latest approach is called Nova which uses even more lasers. Both Shiva and Nova are closely guarded secrets. A computer program called LASNEX which helps their operation by simulating different fusion scenarios based on hundreds of variables and conditions is highly classified. Billions of dollars were spent on both these developments. And yet, as practical energy producing devices, both Shiva and Nova now look like dead ends.

Why is this the case? Why has almost every attempt to tame fusion failed? The answer has to do simply with the magnitude of the problem, and with how less we still understand nature. Both laser fusion and inertial fusion suffer from some fundamental and extremely complex problems that were discovered only when the experiments were underway. One problem has already been stated; the difficulty of confining such a hot plasma of particles. Another problem has to do with instability. As a hot plasma of deuterium and tritium circulates in an intense magnetic and electric field, local inescapable defects and asymmetries in the fields get quickly amplified and cause ‘kinks’ in the flow. The kinks gradually grow bigger like cracks in weak concrete and finally bring the entire structure down, quickly dissipating the plasma and halting fusion. While impressive progress has been made in controlling the fine parameters of the magnetic and electric fields, the problem still persists because of its basic nature. The other problem was that the electrons were getting heated much faster than the nuclei so that the nuclei- the real target- would stay relatively cool. A third serious problem was the initiation of Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities, little whirlpools and tongues that develop when a less-dense material presses against a more-dense material. Interestingly it’s Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities and not gravity that is the reason why water from an overturned glass escapes. Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities developed in laser fusion when less dense photos of light tried to compress a denser pellet of deuterium. These instabilities quickly destroyed the fine balance of the fusion process. The process is exquisitely sensitive to the finest of defects, like nanoscopic dimples of the surface of the pellet. Solving this problem requires the best of physics and engineering.

All these problem still plague fusion, and billions of dollars, thousands of brilliant scientists and hundreds of innovative ideas later, fusion still remains a dream. It has been achieved many times, neutrons have been observed, but breakeven still is a land that’s far, far away.

But scientists don’t give up. And while legitimate scientific efforts on the two ‘hot fusion’ approaches continue, there have been cases where some scientists believed they were observing fusion a tad too easily under circumstances that were too good to believe. These events saw their careers being destroyed and the promise of fusion again mangled. The events refer to the infamous cases of ‘cold fusion’ which constitute the last and most important part of Seife’s book. Seife weaves a riveting tale around these events, partly since he was a participant in one of the debacles.

The story of Pons and Fleischmann’s 1989 cold fusion disaster at the University of Utah is well known. The two took the unusual step of announcing their results in a press conference before getting them peer-reviewed and published. Later their experiments were shown to be essentially irreproducible. Seife recounts in details the developments that gradually cast a black cloud over this claim. One of the characters in this story is Steve Jones, a physicist who has recently gained notoriety for becoming a 9/11 denier.

But I was particularly interested in the next story since I had actually met and talked to one of the characters in the cold fusion catastrophe many years ago. Rusi Taleyarkhan, an Indian scientist, happened to come to our University in 2002 to give a talk. Just a few months before, he and his colleagues had published a paper in the prestigious journal Science, which if true would herald one of the greatest breakthroughs in scientific history. Taleyarkhan and his group claimed to have observed fusion in the most disarmingly simple experiment. They had taken a solution of deuterated acetone (acetone with its hydrogen atoms replaced by deuterium) and had bombarded it with neutrons that caused giant bubbles to form in the solution. They had then exposed the solution to intense acoustic waves, thus causing the bubbles to violently collapse. The phenomenon was well known and is called sonoluminescence, a name alluding to the light that is often given off because of these violent collapses. But what was Taleyarkhan’s claim? That the immense pressures and temperatures generated at the center of the bubbles caused nuclear fusion of the deuterium in the acetone, essentially in a tabletop apparatus at room temperature. Why acetone? This was the question I asked Taleyarkhan when I met him in 2002. He did not know, and he sounded sincere about it.

But this was before the storm was unleashed and the controversy erupted. In this case unlike the previous one, the work had been peer reviewed by one of the most famous and stringent journals in the world. But curiously, further investigation by Seife and others revealed that the paper had been published by Science’s editor in spite of objections by the reviewers. This was highly unusual to say the least. What was more disturbing was that concomitant experiments done at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Taleyarkhan’s home turf at the time, revealed negative results. Once the results were announced, researchers across the world including some at prestigious institutions scurried around to repeat the experiments using more sophisticated detectors and apparatus. Fusion produces very signature neutrons of specific energy. The more sophisticated apparatus failed to detect these neutrons. In the earlier cold fusion debacle, there had been doubt about the energy peaks of the neutrons. Similar doubts started surfacing in this case. Questions were also raised about the possibly shoddy nature of the experiments, including the absence of control experiments. Later Taleyarkhan moved to Purdue, and Purdue initially defended the experiments. But the story remained murky. Some ‘independently’ published later articles turned out to not be so independent after all. Gradually, just like it had previously, the great edifice turned into a crumbling structure and came down. As a reporter for Science then, Seife personally covered these events. Purdue reinvestigated the matter and as of 2008, Taleyarkhan is forbidden from working as a regular PhD. student advisor at Purdue. Even though he was not convicted of deliberate fraud, his reputation has come crashing down.

This then is the history of fusion, episode after episode of wishful thinking to solve the biggest problem in the history of mankind. A fusion reactor may someday be possible, but nothing until now suggests that it would be so. It’s hard to trust a technology if it has consistently failed to deliever on its promise time after time. After all this, even the mention of the statement ‘cheap, abundant and universal energy’ should raise our eyebrows. In the afterword, Seife discusses the rather harsh nature of the scientific process where skepticism is everyone’s best friend and results are intensely vetted, a fact that’s necessary though to keep science and scientists in line. Fusion seems to be one of those endeavors where tall claims have been more consistently proclaimed than perhaps in any other branch of science. This has been undoubtedly so because of the earth-shattering implications of a true practical nuclear fusion reactor and the fame that it will bring its inventor. Even with such a reactor, our problems may not be over. First of all fusion is not as clean as it is made out to be; copious amounts of neutrons, gamma rays and other forms of radiation are released in the process. Secondly, even with mass production fusion reactors may cost no less than tens of millions of dollars. Even as Seife writes, the world’s economies have pooled their resources together into ITER, an international thermonuclear project that promises to be the biggest of its kind until now. The United States did not support the project earlier and it had to be scaled back. Now the US seems to be contributing again to a more modest version of the vision. As with other matters, the politics of fusions seems to be even more elusive than the science of fusion. Gratifyingly, Seife thinks that our best current bet to solve the energy problem is nuclear fission. It emits no carbon dioxide, provides the biggest bang for your buck, and most importantly unlike fusion is already here. Compared to the will-o-wisps of fusion, the very real strands of fission can solve many of our real problems. Ironically, controlled fusion is still a distant dream while very tangible thermonuclear bombs sit securely in the arsenals of so many nations.

In the end, one factor which Seife should have appreciated more in my opinion is the immense knowledge that has been gained from so many years of fusion research. That is one of the great virtues of science, that even failed endeavors can contribute key insights into the workings of nature and uncover new principles. Fusion might be wishful thinking, a grandiose and tragic scheme to put the sun in a bottle, but science always wins. And if not for anything else, for that we should always be grateful.

In 1980, the commercial potential of academic research in the US was harnessed and revolutionized by the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act that allowed university researchers to file patents and own their inventions and universities to reap the financial benefits of their discoveries. One of the most striking long-term products of that act was my advisor’s co-discovery of the anti-HIV drug emtricitabine that made the university 500 million dollars, the largest such royalty paid to an academic institution until that time. Today, 80% of AIDS patients in the US are on a regimen that includes emtricitabine.

In India, universities have been on less than 3% of all patents filed every year. The rather dire financial situation plaguing almost every Indian university and researcher in every way imaginable is well-known. But the passage of an Indian version of the Bayh-Dole act, a bill that could pass in April 2009, could change a lot of things in our country’s scientific landscape. A report in Nature (subscription required) talks about how this bill might forge a new alliance of Indian academia and industry and generate wealth for the public research sector. According to this bill which is closely modeled on its US counterpart, university scientists who file patents would be allowed to garner 30% of the income earned from their patents and licenses, which depending on the product could make them crores of rupees. The scientists’ institutes would keep 40% of the proceeds with the rest being managed to maintain intellectual property. As in many other matters, the only thing which could be the bane of such a policy could be the infighting, corruption and bureaucracy accompanying the potentially lucrative financial benefits that could keep eating away at the basic premise of the framework. However at least in principle, such a bill could reenergize research in many of our decrepit and flagging academic institutions and bring much-needed revenue to the pockets of both individual scientists and universities.

But what I see as an even greater benefit of the bill is the provision that the bill would provide to academic scientists to consult and work in industry without having to leave their academic job. This benefit suddenly makes the enterprise look quite attractive to someone like me. Consider that people like me, potential Indian scientists who keep on having a tug-of-war in their minds about one day returning to their homeland, are constantly put off by the low pay and lack of facilities in many of our universities. Consulting for industry or reaping financial benefits from patents was not really an option for us until now. But now under this act, we would potentially find it much more attractive to work in universities and harness both the power and benefits of industrial research. It could lead to collaboration with industry on projects, a fact that could enable researchers to use expensive high-tech as well as basic facilities in industry. India for example could follow in the footsteps of American and Scandinavian institutions in launching promising university-based drug discovery projects. Of course, the intellectual property issues emerging from such lucrative collaborations are always thorny, but with the right framework and honest initiative they can be worked out. Other countries have done this, and there’s no reason why we cannot.

Such an act will promise great potential incentives and rewards for expatriate Indian scientists to return back home one day. Even more importantly, it may finally provide the financial incentives for Indian students to pursue basic scientific research. Critics of the bill complain that Indian universities are hampered by poor infrastructure and lack of personnel that could make it pointless to implement such a policy. But in my mind, it’s precisely incentives of this kind that could induce more students to do scientific research and could induce universities to speed up the implementation of basic facilities.

When the Bayh-Dole Act was passed, the US already had a thriving applied science paradigm in its universities, something that we generally lack. Places like MIT were already known for actively investing in spin-offs and industrial research. Conversely places like Bell-Labs were heavily investing in basic science research. Acts such as Bayh-Dole can help tie these two disparate ends of the research pipeline together. In India, institutes like the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) have already put a premium on patents and industrial inventions, but the philosophy has not permeated most of our other institutions. An Indian Bayh-Dole bill will certainly provide incentives for students and researchers to engage in high-quality applied research in our universities. But it could also inspire industry to team up with academia in engaging in basic scientific research, an endeavor which would harness the power of industrial facilities. And as the history of technology shows, there is really no substitute for basic scientific research in generating ideas that turn into long-term technological innovations.

With the rosy picture that is painted though, it is still not going to cure the scientific meritocracy that thrives in our universities, nor is it going to quell the favoritism, reservation policies, regionalism and conflicts over credit that continue to be our bane. In addition this is just the beginning; it might take years before the details are hammered out and the bill is transformed into practical policy. And finally we should never forget that no number of bills can replace inquisitive, highly-motivated graduate students and postdocs, not to mention professors, who are critical in carrying an idea from its conception to its application. Bills can also not replace a spirit of scientific inquiry and a national emphasis on scientific temper and science education which is less than widespread in our nation. Science progresses by being perched on the wings of imagination, and not by tugging at the shoestrings of coins and bills.

Nevertheless, this is an auspicious beginning, and we have to begin somewhere and somehow.

More critical and unbiased thinking please

Surendra Gadekar has an article in the latest Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which he asserts that the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal won’t save India from energy problems. Even assuming that this fact holds, Dr. Gadekar seems to think that it logically implies that India should not pursue nuclear power or at the very least put it on the back burner.

The logic is a little messy and ignores some facts.

To be fair, the article has a lively history of India’s determined efforts to wisely go for CANDU heavy water rather than light water reactors (uranium enrichment is much more technologically demanding than heavy water production), and its continued commitment to nuclear research even in the face of worldwide sanctions imposed by the 1974 test. Dr. Gadekar then talks about the dismal state of India’s uranium resources with most regions containing extremely low-grade ore, making it expensive to mine. In many regions officials are unwilling to mine because of local pressure and the Maoist insurgency.

So far so good. One would think that it’s precisely these factors that would make the nuclear deal attractive. But then Dr. Gadekar goes in a different direction, claiming that France and the United States’s ‘moribund’ reactor industries would somehow force the Indian government to buy not just fuel but also reactors. I don’t think I have read a statement to the effect that the government wants to buy reactors by default along with fuel. In any case, if the government does it, Gadekar says that the price of nuclear power will go up.

The conclusion? The nuclear deal is bad for India and nuclear is not the way to go, according to Dr. Gadekar. If nuclear power is really going to become expensive, then wouldn’t we want to adopt the opposite position for now and lap up all the nuclear fuel that we can? Fear that uranium prices would go up in the future as more countries adopt nuclear power should just mean that India with its already well-developed nuclear capacity should embark on a crash program to generate more power with our existing reactors which are for years running at partial capacity.

But a more important development which Dr. Gadekar ignores is that in thorium processing. The Advanced Heavy Water Reactor is one of the most advanced nuclear reactors in the world and the result of years of doughty development by India’s nuclear scientists and engineers. We plan to start serial production of AHWRs by 2020. Here’s what Charles Barton, a veteran nuclear engineer who has retired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (a vast industrial complex built for extracting the Manhattan Project’s uranium), has to say:

The Indians are engaged in a significant thorium fuel cycle. The Indians have already built and tested both thorium fuel cycle proof of concept and developmental thorium fuel cycle reactors and have built or are building prototype thorium fuel cycle reactors including the just completed AHWR, the soon to be completed Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at Kalpakkam, and the more advanced , Fast Thorium Breeder Reactor (FTBR) underdevelopment at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai is the second thorium fuel cycle breeder. The Indians are in the last stage of a 3 stage developmental program for a complex Uranium/thorium reactor fuel system, that is many times more energy efficient than the Uranium/light water reactor fuel system.

The Indians plans to build thorium fuel cycle reactor capable of producing 20 GWy of electrical energy by 2020, and to produces 30% of their electricity from thorium cycle reactors by 2050. Indian scientists calculate that the assurred thorium reserve of India is large enough to provide it with electricity for 400 years.

More efficiency will mean dwindling cost of uranium as well as efficient exploitation of India’s vast thorium resources. But this can only happen if nuclear development is not impeded and more efficient ways of exploiting both uranium and thorium are investigated. Dr. Gadekar’s opinion seems to imply that the scenario for nuclear power based on uranium is so pessimistic that we should forgo the nuclear deal and nuclear development or at least not pursue them vigorously. Not so paradoxically, this very action will indeed hamper future development.

In the end, if Dr. Gadekar really thinks that nuclear is not the way to go, he should shed light on alternative efficient, plentiful and cheap sources of energy. The reader is unfortunately left groping in the dark when Dr. Gadekar sheds not light but darkness on any such analysis with a single concluding statement;

India’s true energy crisis lies in its inability to harness its sunlight and biomass, which would provide a truly useful resource for the majority of its people

This seems to contradict all of Gadekar’s beef with uranium prices. I would be very interested to know how exactly Dr. Gadekar thinks solar power or biomass will produce energy as cheaply as he thinks uranium won’t. Unlike Gadekar, I am not discounting the role that solar and biomass will play in India’s future energy needs. But the technology for their large-scale use is still expensive and far off; nuclear technology is already widely used and highly developed, and pound for pound, nuclear still provides the biggest bang for your buck. India with its power-hungry economy needs as much of this as possible. What it does not need are superficially plausible arguments based on incomplete data. Dr. Gadekar may be well-meaning, but I have a feeling that since he edits a magazine named Anumukti which as its name suggests is in favour of a non-nuclear India, he already is wedded to dogma. It’s sad when intelligent people like Dr. Gadekar try to pen reasonable arguments when they have long since already taken sides.

© Ashutosh Jogalekar

In the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower brought scientists into the White House with the creation of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). His aim was to dissolve barriers between the President and objective scientific advice so that responsible scientists could report directly to the President. In the succeeding years, these scientists provided invaluable advice to the president on the leading scientific issues of the time, mainly nuclear energy and defense.

PSAC admirably served scientists till the 1970s, when Richard Nixon predictably abolished it, in the face of overblown concerns that the scientists were being partisan. Since then, objective and honest science has been more and more unwelcome in the White House, especially with the rise of religious fundamentalism.

Little needs to be said about George W. Bush’s treatment of science, perhaps the worst of any president in the last century. Not only has his administration ignored important results and findings about climate change, the environment and stem cell research, but Bush also appointed favoured, conservative officials to administrative positions in key government agencies such as the FDA. These officials twisted, cherry-picked and even blocked scientific results to make them fall in line with conservative and religious views. Bush’s suport for religion is well known, and he encouraged schools to teach the “debate” between evolution and “intelligent” design. Fuelled by corporate lobbies, Bush also deceptively advocated unpromising scientific ventures like ethanol and the hydrogen economy, when research showed that at the very least, there is no reason to assume that they will contribute substantially to the future energy crisis. John Marburger, the current presidential scientific advisor became more or less only a formal figurehead, obeying the dictates of the administration’s standard blinkered policies. It only needs to be said that such kind of behaviour is business as usual for the Bush administration.

With change looming on the horizon and the dark political skies possibly clearing up for the first time in many years with what seems like a breath of fresh air, it is a good question to ask how the next administration will treat science. The January 4 issue of Science magazine ran an article about the favourite presidential candidates’ views about science. It is heartening to read that, apart from Huckabee and Romney, all three of the current frontrunners for both parties hold reasonably favourable and objective views about scientific research, to differing degrees of course. Especially Barack Obama seems to be very open to objective and transparent scientific advice, and that is one very good reason why he should be president.

With a hopefully science-friendly administration in the future, who should be chosen as the next presidential scientific advisor? This man or woman may likely have the most important public role of any scientist in the last twenty years or so. He or she needs to not only be a great scientist, but also a responsible, effective, and reasonable public official. He or she should be highly regarded by members of the scientific community and should be known as a fair individual. In addition, he or she would need to have a flair for communicating science to the public and reaching out to them, something that’s going to be crucial in the coming years. He or she should be absolutely clear about the concerned science, and should be able to give opinions based on the best and most comprehensive available evidence. Ability to clearly delineate scientific issues without ruffling the feathers of religious fundamentalists too much could be an unfortunately required but nonetheless required quality. As presidential science advisor, tact would as important as fair scientific judgement.

Here are my personal few picks for the next science advisor:

1. Freeman Dyson: I would have actually picked this distinguished physicist if it weren’t for two reasons- his age, and his curious skepticism about global warming. Dyson also has a peculiar set of opinions about reconciling science and religious or supernatural faith, although I have to say that if he had been offered the post, he would not have let these interfere with objective advice. He has already been on many advisory committees. But I doubt whether, given his austere disposition, he would have liked to be at the center of public affairs (I have written about him here)

2. Edward O. Wilson: Since Dyson may not be an apt candidate, here’s my top favourite. Edward Wilson of Harvard is the quintessential example of the scientist-humanitarian-man of letters. His writings are many times poetry exemplified, and his autobiography along with Dyson’s is the best socio-scientific memoir I have ever read. Not only has he made seminal contributions to ecology and evolutionary biology and won the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest scientific honor, he has also won the Pulitzer Prize twice, an astounding and unique combination of achievements. He is a deeply sensitive man who has his pulse on the state of the environment. One of the earliest advocates of conservation, Wilson is a tireless and eloquent advocate of attaining ecological harmony. When it comes to religion, Wilson interestingly contends that it should not be rejected, but investigated with scientific methods. With the environment almost indisputably the essential issue of our time, Wilson would be the perfect person to give the president gentle, unbiased and prudent scientific advice.

3. James Hansen: James Hansen is probably the leading and most knowledgable climate scientist in the United States and perhaps in the world. He was one of the earliest, if not the earliest, to sound alarm bells about global warming based on realistic computer modeling in the 1980s. To this end, he was also one of the first to testify before Congress on climate change. He has been a relentless spokesman for fighting climate change since before the IPCC began publishing comprehensive reports. Over the years, his predictions more than most others’ have been borne true. Hansen is also known for having faced censorship at NASA. He had a hard time getting his conclusions into print during the Bush regime, but he has persevered and prevailed. Again, with climate change being the central issue of our time, Hansen more than anyone else is poised to give advice about this crucial theme to the president.

4. David Baltimore: Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore has spearheaded biological science in America for thirty years. Baltimore along with Howard Temin discovered reverse transcriptase, the essential enzyme of retroviruses including HIV. His leadership of American science and of Caltech has been impressive. The catch? He was involved in an infamous case of plagiarism. Although Baltimore was exonerated, he argued against the plagiarism contentions. Naturally, this single thing should not disqualify him, but I would generally be more skeptical about Baltimore’s objectivity than of the others.

5. Richard Garwin: Richard Garwin worked on the hydrogen bomb as a protégé of Enrico Fermi, and then spent his life fighting to outlaw it. He has always been an unflagging participant in arms disarmament. In the last forty years, he has repeatedly written incisive articles arguing against missile defense and nuclear weapons. Like Dyson, he has also served on scores of important committees. A doyen of the nuclear era, Garwin also might be a little old to hold the post, but would not be a bad choice.

6. Roald Hoffmann and Carl Djerassi: Since I am a chemist, I thought I should put in a plug for two chemists whom I like. Both these gentlemen have very distinguished careers in science and science writing. Hoffmann won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Djerassi is the “father of the contraceptive pill” and unique for being awarded both the National Medals, for Science and for Technology. Both are also playwrights and better-than-amateur poets. Importantly, both of them are well aware of social issues and have insightful comments about them. I don’t know if they have a lot of government experience, but both of them seem to me like they would be good persons to take advice from.

So these are the few that come to my mind. Unfortunately there is no woman among them, but that’s only because I cannot really think of one. If there is one, I will be more than happy to include the name.

But since I have a list of people I like, it may be worth stating the name of someone I definitely would not be comfortable with as science advisor, but who curiously might get chosen.

That man is Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project. Collins has come under attack in the last few years for his belief in a Christian God. And this is not the kind of metaphysical God that Einstein believed in. Collins is a devout churchgoer who argues in strange ways for a scientific basis for believing in a personal God. Till date, I haven’t seen a single defense from him that would allow me to reconcile science and religion in my mind.

There is no doubt that Collins is a fine scientist who has made important contributions. I am not even saying that he would pander to religious fundamentalists. But with religious fundamentalists already having encroached in the White House, the last person we need is a man who would always see blurred boundaries between science and religion, who would not take a firm stand on science. Note that there is a difference between actually wanting to connect science and religion, and respecting people’s personal religion. The latter condition, whether we like it or not, seems to be a part of our time. But that is quite different from mingling science with religion. That is exactly the kind of approach that the advocates of intelligent design espouse, and Collins would only encourage them and scores of other religious people to bring religion even more into schools, universities and the halls of important public discourse, and cause confusion about what science is. Clearly I see Collins as the wrong person for the post.

© Ashutosh S. Jogalekar

Renowned scientist C. N. R Rao has come under fire for denouncing workers in the IT sectors as doing routine work, while they siphon off valuable intellectual talent from science and the arts and give back almost nothing in return. This deserves some further analysis…

Read the rest of the entry on Excursions…