The
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onservationist John Muir wasn't talking
about ORNL history when he said it, but he might as well have been:
``When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to
everything else in the universe.'' 
On first glance, there's little resemblance between the sprawling ORNL
of today and the single-mission radiochemical pilot plant of World War
II. A closer inspection and a longer view, though, show otherwise: An
early scientific path led here, then branched this way and that;
another converged from over yonder. Witness: The Graphite Reactor
showed many uses for nuclear energy, both as a scientific probe and as
a pusher of submarines and spinner of turbines--and it led to other
research reactors. But the Graphite
Reactor was the
trailhead for other paths also, such as explorations of the
problems--technological, environmental, and safety--that arose as a
whole generation of nuclear reactors began showing their age and
imperfection. And the wartime separation of plutonium led to the
peacetime extraction of radiochemical exotica, and the development of
nuclear medicine. So it is with
every path the Laboratory treads: It probably came from a patch of
familiar scientific ground, and sooner or later it's likely to lead
some other place worth exploring.
For the next 50 years, the journey begins with genetic research,
protein engineering, advanced materials, environmental science, nuclear
safety, fusion research. No one can say where it leads. Hard though it was to see at times, ORNL's
half-century of explorations have positioned it to head toward
precisely these kinds of urgent challenges. John Hendrix' vision ended with ``the greatest war
that ever will be.'' ORNL's vision
just began there. 
The
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Date posted 5/10/94 (cel)