Donald Keith Stevens, former associate director for basic energy sciences under the Office of Energy Research (now the Office of Science) at the US Department of Energy (DOE), who spent more than 39 years in public service, died on 25 February 2002 in Kensington, Maryland, of natural causes.
Born on 30 July 1922 in Troy, New York, Don earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Union College in Schenectady, New York, in 1943. That year, he joined the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, as a member of the research staff, working at NRL until 1949. During that period, he also served a brief tour of duty in the US Navy and was assigned by NRL to attend the first reactor school at the Clinton Laboratories (now known as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory). He earned his PhD in physical chemistry, under the guidance of James Crawford, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1953. He performed his thesis research at ORNL’s solid-state physics division, where he used magnetic susceptibility techniques to study radiation damage and the effective masses of electrons and holes in semiconductors.
After receiving his doctorate, Don became a staff member of ORNL’s solid-state division and continued research related to his thesis work until 1957, when the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in Washington requested his services for two years as a staff member of the metallurgy and materials branch. Don contracted a severe case of “Potomac fever,” and ultimately succumbed to it by accepting the position of chief of the metallurgy and materials branch. He remained in Washington after that, surviving the first-order phase transformations from the AEC to the Energy Research and Development Administration and then to DOE.
Don was an early champion of the establishment of interdisciplinary materials research laboratory programs at universities. In 1957, he became the AEC representative to the multiagency coordinating committee on materials research and development, which reported under the Federal Council on Science and Technology (FCST) to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s science adviser, James Killian. Don subsequently became chairperson of the committee. At a key 1958 meeting, Don, Willard Libby of the AEC’s general advisory committee, and John Kincaid of the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency convinced Herbert York, DOD director of defense research and engineering, that Don’s investigations under AEC auspices established and documented a great need to create interdisciplinary materials laboratories in universities and to support the creation of buildings to house them.
By the end of the 1960s, the government had established 16 interdisciplinary materials laboratories, 12 of which were sponsored by the DOD (and subsequently were transferred to NSF), 2 by NASA, and 2 by the AEC. The two AEC-sponsored labs, one at the University of California, Berkeley, and the other at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are still supported today by the AEC’s successor agency, DOE, under what are presently called the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, respectively.
Many of Don’s contributions to the American scientific enterprise are legendary. He played a major role in the establishment of world-class scientific user facilities for x-ray synchrotron radiation, neutron sources for neutron scattering, and electron beam microcharacterization centers that are now used by 8000 scientists annually. These facilities include the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory (the accompanying photograph of Don was taken at the dedication of the NSLS in 1982); LBNL’s Advanced Light Source; ORNL’s High Flux Isotope Reactor; the Advanced Photon Source and the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source at Argonne National Laboratory; and the now closed High Flux Breeder Reactor at Brookhaven.
Don also was involved in the celebrated 1984 National Research Council report, written by a committee chaired by Frederick Seitz and Dean Eastman, that clearly set forth the national need, and paved the way, for the construction of the Advanced Light Source, Advanced Photon Source, and ultimately the Spallation Neutron Source, currently under construction at ORNL. This report also suggested new capabilities at then existing facilities such as centers for cold neutron research, insertion devices on existing synchrotron radiation facilities, and an experimental hall and instrumentation at Los Alamos Neutron Scattering Center at Los Alamos National Laboratory, all of which have now been achieved. He played a lead role in promoting scientific interactions with synchrotron facilities in the former USSR and the People’s Republic of China, and established the US–Japan scientific program exchange on neutron scattering.
In 1985, as the new associate director for basic energy sciences, Don began building a cutting-edge program that advanced the frontier of understanding. He knew that the scientific discovery process involved probing the unknown and that genuine scientific discovery, by its nature, required a willingness to underwrite risk-taking endeavors for which certain results could not be predicted in advance. When aspiring investigators who wanted funds would tell Don that they knew they could deliver a particular product or result within three or any number of years, Don understood that any such possible results would be of no more than mediocre value, and he would not provide funds. His philosophy of managing research was to fund the right people and not try to micromanage them from Washington. The choice of programs that he did fund has led to six Nobel Prizes, and because many of the programs that he initiated are still under way, this impressive list might yet experience further growth.
Don was a superb manager of science and engineering programs. For many years, and despite many changes on the federal scene, he served both the government and the national scientific enterprise. His masterful absorption or deflection of bureaucratic noise permitted investigators to accomplish more and the government to get more for the public’s money.
Don had the rare quality of knowing both who he was and what authority he had and, simultaneously, of treating his subordinates as equals. He was outspoken in his views but always willing to listen to equally outspoken opinions from his subordinates. Most of all, he was never remote from the scientific community that he served so well.
