Berkeley Lab staff (from left) David Richardson, Rosanne Boudreau, and James Singzon are making it possible for scientists to conduct research related to COVID-19. (Credit: Berkeley Lab)
David Richardson's job is literally to make sure the light stays on. But it's not just any light - it's a very special X-ray light that could play a crucial role in an eventual treatment for COVID-19.
Richardson is an operator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's synchrotron light source facility, the Advanced Light Source (ALS), and is one of a handful of workers providing essential services to scientists working on COVID-19-related research. Scientists have always relied on these staff members - the technicians, computing specialists, facilities managers, and others who make research possible - but their work has taken on a new sense of urgency these days. And as the Bay Area continues to shelter in place, these workers are among the few who are even allowed onto the Berkeley Lab site.
"With COVID-19, there is an awareness that work done at the ALS in the coming weeks may save thousands and thousands of lives in the immediate future," Richardson said. "When treatments, a vaccine, or a cure for this disease are found, there's a very good chance that the light sources of the world will have contributed to that victory. This adds a new dimension of meaning to the work we do at ALS."
Berkeley Lab, a multidisciplinary national lab under the Department of Energy (DOE), has not only launched a number of its own research efforts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has also set aside dedicated time at its science facilities for researchers from other institutions to use. Those facilities include the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit (ABPDU), for testing manufacturing of bioproducts; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a supercomputing center; the Molecular Foundry, for nanoscale science; and the ALS. (None of the facilities is working with live virus.)
David Richardson - keeping the light on
David Richardson is an operator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's synchrotron light source facility, the Advanced Light Source (ALS). (Courtesy David Richardson)
The ALS is a synchrotron facility operated by Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy. It normally gets about 2,000 scientific users a year from around the world, whose experiments are awarded "beam time" if they pass a peer-review proposal process. The ALS uses a particle accelerator to produce extremely bright beams of infrared, ultraviolet, and X-ray light that allow researchers to examine matter - such as proteins - at the molecular and atomic level.
Normally, the ALS would be performing 40 simultaneous experiments spanning fields from physics and chemistry to materials science and biology. Now, only a handful of biology experiments are being performed on behalf of academic researchers as well as scientists from a number of pharmaceutical companies. (Read this article
