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Happy 60th Birthday to Brookhaven National Laboratory

By David T. Troyan

Suffolk County is the eastern-most part of New York State and makes up two thirds of the area of Long Island—and all of the county’s 34 Rotary Clubs are in District 7260.  Suffolk has two distinctive features here that can be seen from outer space: The first is the twin forks at the county’s eastern end, which gives the island its unique fish-tailed shape.  Looking at any satellite image of the island, from Brooklyn and Queens in the west to Montauk Point and Orient Point in the east, you can understand why Walt Whitman called it the “fish-shaped Paumanok.”

Another unique L.I. feature visible from space is not a geologic, but made by humankind: Satellite images show a ring positioned some 15 miles west of the intersection of the North and South Forks. This ring—2.4 miles in circumference and used to collide heavy ions or polarized protons at velocities approaching light speed—is one of the major research facilities at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). 

Founded on March 21, 1947, BNL is celebrating its 60th anniversary as the nation’s first national laboratory dedicated to peaceful, non-weapons related basic and applied research. Today, Brookhaven Lab is one of 13 U.S. Department of Energy national labs, but the only one in the Northeast U.S.

Many of the same, post-World War II dynamics that cemented the existence of the nation’s weapons laboratories also resulted in the birth of peacetime Brookhaven Lab. All the national labs owe their existence to the Manhattan Project, the first U.S. research and development effort to build an atomic bomb. The success of this scientific endeavor—with its large teams of scientists, engineers and technicians concentrated at large research facilities—established the paradigm for how post-WWII “big science” was to be performed. So, after the war, a consortium of research universities eager to locate a research lab in the Northeast U.S. convinced the federal government that a surplus Army camp in eastern Suffolk County was the perfect place.

When transfer of Camp Upton from the War Department to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which was a forerunner of today’s U.S. Department of Energy, took place, BNL was established to find peaceful uses of the atom to improve public well-being. To do so, the Lab took two complementary avenues: First, it began large basic research programs, employing resident scientists in the physical, biological, and chemical sciences; and, second, the Lab began design, construction and operation of “big machines” for science that, due to their size, smaller institutions could not host, but to which academia, industry and other labs would send their researchers. On each of these fronts, Brookhaven Lab has been wildly successful, as evidenced by its six Nobel Prizes over the past 60 years.

Four of those Nobel Prizes are in Physics and were awarded for work done at or using data from one of BNL’s accelerators. Three generations of accelerators and colliders later, Brookhaven Lab is now home to the discovery of the world’s most perfect fluid which last existed moments after the Big Bang—a finding uncovered at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) , which is the ring visible from space. Speaking of space, Brookhaven Lab now has the only heavy-ion accelerator in the U.S. for the studying the effects of space radiation—which is why NASA built a lab at the Lab to do just that.

The most recent Noble Prize was awarded for work done at BNL in Chemistry: Dr. Roderick MacKinnon shared the 2003 Chemistry Nobel for experiments, some of which were done using x-rays from the National Synchrotron Light Source, that determined the structure and function of ion channels, which, for instance, move salts in and out of cells in the nervous system and cardiac system within our bodies.

BNL is also proud that one of its own staff scientists— the late Raymond Davis Jr.—won a Nobel. Dr. Davis shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics for being the first to detect particles called neutrinos coming from the Sun, thereby proving that a reaction called fusion is the source of its energy. He achieved this discovery through an experiment from 1967 to 1985 located in the Homestake gold mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

In addition to award-winning physics and chemistry, BNL’s biomedical, energy and environmental, and homeland and national security research and technology development have benefited individuals and the nation as well as earned accolades. For instance, Brookhaven Lab developed the technology that permits hospitals to make and use the radioistope technitium-99m, which today is employed in 85 percent of the world’s medical scans. BNL also developed the radiotracer that makes possible PET imaging for the diagnosis and staging of diseases such as cancer. And the Laboratory used PET to make groundbreaking discoveries about addictions to cocaine, tobacco, food, and more.

Looking to the future, the Laboratory just this May opened its tenth major research facility—the Center for Functional Nanomaterials. At the fifth U.S. Department of Energy nanoscience center in the nation, interdisciplinary science is taking place on the nanoscale—which is one billionth of a meter—with the goal of improving the structure and function of materials, thereby helping to solve America’s energy problems.

Over 60 years, the staff and visiting scientists of Brookhaven National Lab have not only published their discoveries in scholarly journals, but they have also gone out to District 7260 Rotary Clubs and others to speak on the latest science news. They have also invited Rotary members and others to tour the Lab or stop by on for a summer Sunday open house, so we can discover Brookhaven for ourselves. With the research staff and facilities to find solutions to an infinite supply of scientific problems of national interest, places such as Brookhaven National Lab will be at the forefront of the nation’s science research for many more decades to come.

Editor’s note: The author acknowledges the assistance of Marsha Belford from BNL's community relations office in the editing and fact checking of this article.