POLICY | MATTERS
Lasers’ Reach
Far Exceeds
Initial Grasp
Tom Price
Initially called the “solution in search of a problem,” the laser has become the perfect
demonstration of the long-term value of government-funded research.
T
he U.S. Defense Department
wanted to improve radar when
it funded the research that led to the
invention of the laser 50 years ago. No
government official or scientist then had
visions of supermarket bar codes, DVDs
or laser-assisted eye surgery. The laser’s
enormous impact on the world economy
makes a powerful argument for government-funded research today, scientists
and a business executive told members
of Congress at an April 28 R&D Caucus
Briefing titled “Forum on Innovation:
Technology, Lasers and Jobs.”
“What would happen if all lasers
stopped working?” Thomas Baer asked
at the Capitol Hill event hosted by the
Congressional Research and Development Caucus. He went on to explain
what did happen when one laser-enabled
industry, telecommunications, failed
suddenly in San Jose, Calif., the capital
of Silicon Valley.
“All telephone land lines died,” said
Baer, OSA’s immediate past president
and executive director of the Stanford
Photonics Research Center. “All cell
phone traffic went down. The Internet
went down. No 911 calls could be made.
All financial transactions stopped.”
Television and radio signals were
disrupted, he added. Sequenced traffic
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Lasers are used for
medical treatments a
million times a month
and for diagnosis a
half-million times
signals ceased functioning. Credit card
purchases couldn’t be verified. ATMs
stopped dispensing cash.
All this happened because just one sector of the economy shut down. If all lasers
stopped working, Baer noted, much of
the economy would be disrupted. Lasers
affect between a third and a half of the
U.S. gross domestic product, he said.
Democratic Rep. Rush Holt of New
Jersey, a physicist and the R&D Caucus co-chair, said the story of the laser
is “the best case-study” of the value of
government investment in research and
development.
E. Duco Jansen, of Vanderbilt University, and Mike Rinn, of the Boeing Co.,
described the laser’s impact on medicine
and the military. Jansen, a professor of
biomedical engineering and neurological
surgery, said that medical applications
of the laser have been developed through
“a true partnership of industry, academics
and the federal government. You have
to have all three in place for the thing to
work.” Lasers are used for medical treatments a million times a month and for
diagnosis a half-million times, Jansen said.
The public is familiar with laser
surgery to correct eyesight. Most people
probably don’t know the many other ways
that lasers are used to identify and treat
illness. For example, laser-enabled optical
coherence tomography provides resolution
that is 100 times higher than MRIs or CT
scans. Lasers are used to measure glucose
in diabetics and to identify brain tumors.
During brain surgery, laser-enabled imaging reveals the boundaries of a tumor
more accurately than other methods, he
said. As a result, the surgeon is more likely
to remove the entire tumor, reducing the
likelihood of cancer recurrence.
Because lasers are so precise, they
can diagnose and treat at less cost and
with less pain for patients than standard
methods, Jansen said. Lasers are also
used for the precision manufacturing of
medical devices.
The U.S. military has found uses for
lasers that extend far beyond the initial
search for more-accurate radar, according to Rinn, vice president and director
of Boeing’s airborne laser program. Lasers
are deployed to identify and illuminate
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hard-to-find targets, he said. They guide
bombs and missiles to those targets with a
precision that reduces collateral damage.
Scientists envision laser weapons that
could damage components of enemy
weapons in order to lessen their impact.
Researchers are attempting to develop
instruments with powerful laser beams
that could destroy enemy weapons by
burning or exploding them or by causing
them to disintegrate. Once deployed,
such a laser would offer extreme precision and low cost per shot, Rinn said.
One of the best-known of these
attempts is the program that Rinn runs.
The goal is to place on an airplane lasers
that can illuminate and destroy ballistic
missiles shortly after launch. Boeing’s
airborne laser shot down two missiles in
tests in February, Rinn said. The program
has also spun off some technologies that
are useful to civilians, such as adaptive
optics for astronomers.
The laser’s history demonstrates that
government-funded research “results
frequently in the creation of technology
that leads to the establishment of whole
new industries and economic prosperity,
although it’s often not obvious when the
funding is granted,” Baer said.
Americans invented the laser, even
though Europeans had done important
work in the area, because “the United
States was investing in research heavily
at the time, in the midst of the cold war,
right after Sputnik,” he said. Europe and
Asia, meanwhile, were recovering from the
devastation of World War II, which hit
them harder than it hit the Americas.
Promising current laser research is
exploring the feasibility of fusion energy
and investigating nuclear energy and
nuclear explosions to make the U.S.
nuclear weapons stockpile safer, Baer said.
In addition to funding research, Baer
said, the U.S. government should support
more effective transfer of scientific discoveries into commercial applications.
American companies tend to be more
focused on short-term product development than on capitalizing on the longerterm promises of university research, he
said. Several other countries are paying
more attention to how government can
foster that technology transfer, Baer said.
“We need to do it for competitive reasons because other governments are doing
it,” he said. “It is an effective way to create
a competitive economy. t
Tom Price ([email protected]) is a
Washington-based journalist who focuses on
government, politics, technology, business and
education.
ONLINE EXTRA: View presentation slides from E. Duco Jansen and Mike Rinn and an educational handout about laser applications.
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