[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 17 (Wednesday, January 29, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S602-S604]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. COONS (for himself and Mr. Rubio):
  S. 1973. A bill to improve management of the National Laboratories, 
enhance technology commercialization, facilitate public-private 
partnerships, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Energy and 
Natural Resources.
  Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I rise to speak about a bill introduced 
today--a bipartisan bill--a bill that will strengthen America's 
innovation economy.
  Over the last 60 years our national laboratories have served as 
leading centers of research and discovery in America. Today we have 17 
DOE labs charged with three broad research missions: science, energy, 
and national security. Although they have grown and changed since their 
founding to encompass much broader ranges of work and are successful in 
carrying out their primary missions, labs are not fully optimized to 
take part in today's innovation culture. That is a problem, because in 
this century of rapid change, America's best competitive advantage 
remains our capacity to innovate.
  Over the coming months, I will be talking more about a few things 
Congress can do to streamline and jumpstart our Nation's hubs of 
discovery so that we can thrive as a 21st-century innovation economy.
  At the top level, it will mean reauthorizing the America COMPETES Act 
to reaffirm our commitment to the robust national strategy for science 
and technology programs that will continue to be a critical 
underpinning of American prosperity.
  And one part of that is how our national labs operate, which is why 
today Senator Rubio and I have introduced the America INNOVATES Act.
  Already, our labs have incubated many groundbreaking innovations.
  Their research has led to breakthroughs from new Melanoma and HIV/
AIDS treatments to IED detonators that can save the lives of our troops 
in combat. And that research is critical because although the private 
sector will continue to be a key source of innovation, the Federal 
Government has and will continue to play a central role in advancing 
innovation.
  Why is that? Private markets, historically speaking, tend to 
underinvest in R&D relative to the potential benefits to society. This 
is especially true in the energy sector.
  But, if there is a problem that I have heard since coming to 
Congress, It is that too often, the great work of our scientists 
doesn't translate to the marketplace.
  Right now, too much groundbreaking science and too many innovative 
ideas never leave the walls of our national labs, squandering enormous 
potential in the commercial market.
  Now, in our bill, we continue to support our labs' core mission. We 
are

[[Page S603]]

not proposing anything drastic. What we are doing is modernizing the 
labs for the 21st century--so ideas in the lab can more effectively 
become innovations in the market. Luckily, we need only look to the 
labs themselves for inspiration on how to do this.
  We make two broad proposals.
  First we are integrating the management of the Department of Energy's 
science and energy programs to improve the linkages between basic and 
applied sciences. This will allow the early stages of research and 
development to be translated more efficiently, and it is something that 
Secretary Moniz has signaled he supports and is moving forward on.
  Second we are giving the national labs more power to work with the 
private sector to ensure that more scientific discoveries can turn into 
commercial breakthroughs.
  Together, these steps would allow us to streamline the labs' work so 
it can more quickly and effectively translate into the transformative 
innovations that can create jobs and grow our economy.
  Now, to explain what our proposals intend to achieve, I will walk 
through what is known as the innovation pipeline, which shows how basic 
science research can become a world-changing innovation.
  First, I will use the example of the great work that scientists at 
the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, CO, are doing to advance 
cellulosic ethanol technologies.
  One of our country's big challenges today is reducing our dependence 
on foreign oil, and to do that we need new fuel options that we can 
create here in America.
  Cellulosic ethanol is an advanced biofuel with a lot of promise 
because it is produced from abundant materials like grasses and wood 
chips as well as other types of biomass and waste. And because these 
materials are so abundant, cellulosic ethanol has the potential to 
replace a significant portion of our Nation's petroleum consumption.
  The challenge comes, however, because, unlike corn, these cellulosic 
materials are made of complex starches that are harder to break down 
into ethanol.
  To make the promise of cellulosic ethanol a reality, we needed to 
develop the enzymes and micro-organisms that could break down and then 
ferment those complex starches.
  That is where the innovation pipeline comes in. At the NREL in 
Colorado, scientists started at this first step here--basic science. 
Basic science is very fundamental, it is the study of the elementary 
principles of the universe--really discovery level science.
  Enzymes are large biological molecules that are nature's catalysts--
accelerating metabolic processes that sustain life.
  To develop enzymes and micro-organisms capable of converting starchy 
biomass into cellulosic ethanol, you need to start at the fundamentals 
of biology and biochemistry. This includes studying the intricate 
details of the relevant biochemical processes, as well as probing the 
proteins and amino-acids that form the building blocks of enzymes down 
to the submolecular level.
  At this point, scientists can move into the applied science stage of 
the pipeline. Applied research generally concerns translating those 
basic, fundamental principles into an application.
  In this example, scientists apply the insights gained from the 
fundamental basic science stage to develop new enzymes with desired 
performance traits such as high selectivity, specificity, and stability 
to enable effective and efficient conversion of the complex starches 
into ethanol.
  Applied research can also include controlled lab-scale demonstrations 
to test how effectively these newly developed enzymes and micro-
organisms can turrijsay, wood chips, into fuel.
  Still in the lab and far from full commercial scale production, the 
kinds of small discoveries that happen at the applied science level act 
as an early demonstration that something new is possible.
  At the applied research stage, we are still far away from creating 
something ready for the market, but between these two stages our 
scientists have gone from the basic science of how an idea may work to 
actually demonstrating that it could work in practice.
  At this point now, the private sector is more likely to see its 
potential value. Our scientists have shown that the technology is 
possible, and next we move to the commercialization and scaling and 
deployment phases, where private investors and companies take the 
technology our lab scientists have developed and make it a product that 
can succeed in the market.
  During the applied research stage at NREL, scientists were hard at 
work showing that they really could produce cellulosic ethanol 
efficiently and cheaply--eventually meeting their goal to make it price 
competitive with conventional fuels in today's commercial market.
  That is where we are right now with cellulosic ethanol. Companies 
across the country, such as DuPont, Poet, and others, are currently 
building plants to produce cellulosic ethanol at large scale and at 
competitive prices.
  So that is one model of public-private partnerships for innovation--
where the basic and applied science research can begin in the lab and 
then be transferred to private sector companies who can create a 
commercial product.
  I had the opportunity last year to witness another model of public-
private partnerships for innovation at the Lawrence Berkeley National 
Lab, which is home to the Advanced Light Source, or ALS. The ALS serves 
thousands of researchers--from private sector scientists to university 
researchers--who use light sources such as soft xrays, ultraviolet 
light, and infrared light to conduct a wide range of scientific 
experiments. Experiments at the ALS are performed at nearly 40 beam 
lines that can operate simultaneously around the clock and year-round.
  The facility's resources would be too expensive for any one company 
to invest in alone, but by building a public facility that then is 
partly sustained by fees and targeted infrastructure investments by 
users, the ALS becomes a place where many different partners can come 
to test new ideas and approaches.
  In terms of the innovation pipeline, what the Berkeley Lab and its 
ALS do is allow a diverse range of researchers to engage in various 
stages of research under one roof. The unique capabilities offered at 
the ALS also attract many industry partners and encourages productive 
public-private collaboration.
  A good example of this is the partnership between the lab and the 
semiconductor industry.
  Semiconductor technology is one of the most transformative scientific 
breakthroughs of the 20th century. Semiconductors are at the heart of 
what makes a computer work. Their constant advancement is what allows 
us today to hold the computing power of last generation's supercomputer 
in our pockets.
  However, the manufacturing techniques previously used to produce new, 
smaller, and more powerful semiconductor products aren't adequate to 
build the next generation of nano-electronic devices.
  So what has happened is a consortium of companies including Intel, 
IBM, HP, and Dow Chemical--called SEMATECH--came together to leverage 
the unique capabilities at the lab to advance semiconductor 
manufacturing technology for next-generation electronics.
  As the lab reports, ``[By] tapping into the Center's long term 
expertise in short wavelength optics and the unique properties of the 
ALS Synchotron facility, SEMATECH funded the development of the world's 
highest resolution projection lithography tool and highest performance 
[extreme-ultraviolet] microscope''--developments that were only 
possible because of the facilities and expertise at the lab.
  Having then developed new tools capable of manufacturing the next 
generation of semiconductor devices, a company like Intel can take the 
new technology and scale it up in their own plants.
  Of course, there are many variations of public private partnerships 
that our labs can and have utilized to take ideas from the lab to the 
market. These two examples--cellulosic ethanol and the advancement of 
semiconductor manufacturing technology--show us what is really possible 
by working in partnership with our national labs.

[[Page S604]]

  In our bill Senator Rubio and I are trying to expand the flexibility 
and freedom of all our labs to innovate and build productive 
partnerships so that every research project has the potential and 
opportunity to eventually enter the market.
  As we see here on the innovation pipeline, the payoff for all this 
work doesn't come until the very end, so one of the best things we can 
do is focus our policies to make the movement of ideas through the 
pipeline as efficient as possible.
  While there are plenty of areas where Senator Rubio and I disagree, 
we have come together on the America INNOVATES Act because we both 
agree that government has a role to play investing in the early 
scientific research that can lead to innovations that change our world.
  In this bill, we aren't talking about expanding government or calling 
for new spending or regulation, we are talking about the early science 
work that only government can fund because there isn't yet a clear 
payoff for the private sector and finding out how to connect the 
national labs and the private sector along this innovation pipeline in 
a better and stronger way to deliver more products to the American 
marketplace and the world markets.

  Once again, I thank my Republican colleague Senator Marco Rubio. I 
urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join us in supporting 
this bipartisan innovation jobs bill.

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