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The system of centralized national laboratories grew out of the massive scientific endeavors of World War II, in which new technologies such as radar, the computer, the proximity fuze, and the atomic bomb proved decisive for the Allied victory. Though the United States government had begun seriously investing in scientific research for national security since World War I, it was only in late 1930s and 1940s that monumental amounts of resources were committed or coordinated to wartime scientific problems, under the auspices first of the National Defense Research Committee , and later the Office of Scientific Research and Development , organized and administered by the MIT engineer Vannevar Bush.
During the second world war, centralized sites such as the Radiation Laboratory at MIT and Ernest O. Lawrence's laboratorySan Francisco Bay. The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory LBNL , formerly the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory and usually shortened to Berkeley Lab is a U. Department of Energy national laboratory in Berkeley, California conducting unclass at the University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal Berkeley UCB or UC Berkeley is a public, coeducational university situated in the foothills of Berkeley, California to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate and its bridge. allowed for a large number of expert scientists to collaborate towards defined goals as never before, and with virtually unlimited government resources at their disposal.
In the course of the war, the Allied nuclear effort, the Manhattan ProjectThe Manhattan Project or more fully, the Manhattan Engineering District Project was an effort during World War II to develop the first nuclear weapons by the United States with assistance from the United Kingdom and Canada. Its research was directed by Am, created several secret sites for the purpose of bomb research and material development, including a laboratory in the desert of New MexicoNew Mexico is a state in the southwestern United States and its U. postal abbreviation is NM . The state's two official languages are English and Spanish. Nuevo Mexico was the Spanish name for the territory north and west of the Rio Grande. USS New Mexico directed by Robert OppenheimerLos Alamos National Laboratory beginning in 1943. Robert Oppenheimer ( April 22, 1904 February 18, 1967) was a Jewish-American physicist and the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort to develop nuclear weapons, at the Los A ( Los AlamosLos Alamos National Laboratory (LANL is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory, managed by the University of California, located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Laboratory is one of the largest multidisciplinary institutions in the, and sites at Hanford, WashingtonThe Hanford Site occupies 1,518 square kilometers (586 square miles) in Benton County, south-central Washington. It was established in 1943 during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project to provide the plutonium necessary for the development of nucl and Oak Ridge, TennesseeOak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL is a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory managed for the United States Department of Energy by UT-Battelle, LLC. ORNL is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville. Scientists and engineers at O. Hanford and Oak Ridge were administered by private companies, and Los Alamos was administered by a public university (the University of California). Additional success was had at the University of Chicago in reactor research, and at other academic institutions spread across the country.
After the war and its scientific successes, the newly created Atomic Energy Commission took over the future of the wartime laboratories, extending their lives indefinitely (they were originally thought of as temporary creations). Funding and infrastructure were secured to sponsor other "national laboratories" for both classified and basic research, especially in physics. Each national laboratory would generally be centered around one or many expensive machines (such as particle accelerators or nuclear reactors).
Most national laboratories maintained staffs of local researchers as well as allowing for visiting researchers to use their equipment, though priority to local or visiting researchers often varied from lab to lab. With their centralization of resources (both monetary and intellectual), the national labs serve as a exemplar for Big Science.
Elements of both competition and cooperation were encouraged in the laboratories. Often two laboratories with similar missions were created (such as Lawrence Livermore which was designed to compete with Los Alamos) with the hope that competition over funding would create a culture of high quality work. Laboratories which did not have overlapping missions would cooperate with each other (for example, Lawrence Livermore would cooperate with the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, which itself was often in competition with Brookhaven National Laboratory).
The national laboratory system, administered first the Atomic Energy Commission, then the Energy Research and Development Administration , and currently the Department of Energy is one of the largest (if not the largest) scientific research systems in the world, while the DOE provides more than 40% of the total national funding for physics, chemistry, materials science, and other areas of the physical sciences. Many are locally managed by private companies, while other are managed by academic universities, and as a system they form one of the overarching and far-reaching components in what is known as the " iron triangle" of military, academia, and industry.
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