Today’s New York Times outlines Los Alamos National Laboratory’s up-for-grabs contract, a hot competition between the University of California system, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. Several in the article worry that a shift from UC would lead to a shift away from science, technology, and innovation. “[T]he struggle is over Los Alamos’s mission - whether it should turn away from its traditional role as a center of scientific excellence toward a narrower one focused on weapons design and production, in essence a bomb factory,” says the Times.

The recruiting and staffing implications are huge according to Hugh Gusterson, an analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the nation’s nuclear arms laboratories:

“If you’re trying to recruit a young Ph.D. from Princeton, and you tell them you’re working for the University of California and not a bomb shop, it really matters…People were just stricken,” he said. “They’re worried that Los Alamos will increasingly become a manufacturing facility. A lot of people were talking about early retirement.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Federally funded institutions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.