Statements on Introduced Bills and Resolutions

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

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 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.

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.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source