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Krebs Steps Down as Science Chief of DOE, Breaking Longevity Record
“In particular,” she noted, “your administration can claim a record of delivering the highest of high technology on schedule, within budget, and with a level of performance that enables American scientists to lead the world in many fields.” Krebs went on to express her satisfaction at the completion of the Fermilab Main Injector and the B-Factory at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center on time and on budget, and at seeing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in its first runs at Brookhaven National Laboratory. She neglected to mention that the Superconducting Super Collider had been terminated by Congress just as her tenure began in 1993, though in an interview later, she admitted that “it was my greatest challenge and my greatest frustration.” Krebs stated in her letter to Clinton that she was proud of expanding DOE’s funding for high-energy physics at universities and of “the successful negotiation and ongoing participation in the precedent-setting collaboration to construct the Large Hadron Collider and its detectors at the CERN Laboratory in Switzerland.” When James Sensenbrenner Jr, chairman of the House Science Committee, learned that Krebs had boasted about her part in the CERN negotiations, he guffawed. Sensenbrenner and other conservative members of Congress had erected hurdles that CERN officials were told they had to leap to attain approval of US participation. During the Memorial Day weekend in 1997, Sensenbrenner had flown to Geneva, confronted Chris Llewellyn Smith, CERN’s director at the time, and negotiated several concessions that improved the role of US physicists in the management of the LHC and made it clear that the US would not spend more than the predetermined contribution of $531 million ($450 million by DOE and $81 million by the National Science Foundation), even if the project had cost overruns. (See Physics Today, August 1997, page 43.) Krebs earned a PhD in theoretical physics from Catholic University in Washington in 1966 and then served as staff director of the House subcommittee on energy development and applications. Before her appointment to the DOE post, she served for ten years as associate director for planning and development at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. When she joined LBL in 1983, she became the first woman associate director in the whole DOE lab system. One of her first achievements at Berkeley was to win the support of Congress for the Advanced Light Source. David Shirley, then director of the Berkeley lab, described her political resourcefulness as “spectacular” when he was asked about Krebs’s skills by the newly elected Clinton administration, which was seeking a woman to run DOE’s research program. The White House also asked the late Glenn Seaborg, the longtime AEC chairman, about Krebs’s abilities. Seaborg, then professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and associated with the lab, replied in a letter to Vice President Al Gore that Krebs “has been involved in the development of nearly every initiative that has come to LBL in the last ten years. . . . She understands the changing context in which scientific programs must be developed, with their emphasis on their contribution to society.” (See Physics Today, August 1993, page 41.) Owed a ‘debt of
gratitude’ Trivelpiece praised Krebs for making scientific collaborations “a cornerstone of her leadership.” In fact, he said, “getting the labs together on scientific projects and improving the working conditions at the labs, which includes putting our funding on a high priority in the department and then in Congress, have been two of her biggest accomplishments.” Her backing “was decisive,” he added, for the most advanced x-ray sources at Berkeley and Argonne National Laboratory and on accelerator upgrades at Fermilab, Stanford, and Brookhaven. Such facilities have elevated US research in the developing field of structural biology, he said. Trivelpiece and other lab directors also point to Krebs’s efforts to accelerate DOE’s human genome program. Krebs’s legacy includes the Human Genome Laboratory at the Berkeley lab and the Joint Genome Institute, a collaboration of the Berkeley, Livermore, and Los Alamos labs, which operate the place on a consolidated budget. The institute is now the second largest producer of gene sequence in the US and third in the world. Krebs also had a hand in the development of the $1.3 billion Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge. SNS, designed to be the world’s largest facility of its kind, is the successor to the Advanced Neutron Source, which failed to get Congress’s support because of its multibillion dollar price tag. Krebs insisted that SNS would prosper politically and scientifically as a collaboration. Oak Ridge scientists and engineers are now working with their colleagues at Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, and Los Alamos in the design and construction of SNS. “Her support for SNS is without parallel,” Trivelpiece said. Krebs has been exploring several options for the next stage of her career—most likely at an academic institution, but possibly at some commercial organization. Meanwhile, sources at DOE say James Decker, deputy director of the Office of Science, will fill in for Krebs on an acting basis, a role he played for months when Trivilpiece departed, and which he is most likely to have again in the remaining year of the Clinton administration. -- Irwin Goodwin © 1999 American Institute of Physics
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Martha
Krebs, the longest-serving director of scientific research at the Department
of Energy, informed President Clinton, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson,
and her staff on 23 September that she intends to leave the government
in early December. Krebs, who was named by Clinton in July 1993 to be
director of DOE’s Office of Energy Research and was confirmed by the Senate
a month later, surpassed Alvin Trivelpiece’s record of nearly six years
in the job. Trivelpiece left the department in 1987 and now heads Oak
Ridge National Laboratory. He telephoned Krebs in August to congratulate
her on surpassing his mark. Most research directors at DOE and its predecessor,
the Atomic Energy Commission, usually stayed in the post for two or, at
most, three years.