ORNL is a major source of isotopes, providing more than 300 for use in medicine, research, industry and space exploration.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory today is an open science laboratory that attracts thousands of scientists and engineers from around the globe each year. It began in the World War II Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bombs. In summer 1939, tensions were rising among European powers...
In the early 1970s, scientists at laboratories worldwide raced to unravel the mystery of how billions of miles of DNA are packaged inside the cells of the human body. ORNL’s Don and Ada Olins were the first to discover the critical structure—the nucleosome—that winds DNA around proteins like thre...
Jeremy Busby didn’t always understand the power of technology transfer, where fundamental discoveries are nurtured to succeed in the marketplace.
Busby, who directs ORNL’s Materials Science and Technology Division, is older and wiser now, and he's seen the process work.
Busby leads one of ORNL...
It takes more than world-class scientists and engineers to run an institution like ORNL. It also takes world-class welders, pipefitters, glassblowers, riggers and other tradespeople to keep the facilities running and sometimes to build specialized equipment that is unobtainable in any other way. ...
Integrating electron microscopy and atomic imaging with big data technologies is a monumental task, but the end result is a deeper, more powerful understanding and control over materials functionality at the atomic level. That understanding is what attracted Sergei Kalinin, a researcher at the Ce...