In Sex, Bombs and Burgers: How War, Porn and Fast Food Created Technology as we know it, author Peter Nowak, senior writer, science and technology for CBCNews.ca, and a former Financial Post reporter, argues that most of the major technological advances in the past 60 years have stemmed from this trio of billion-dollar industries. In this excerpt, he writes that the creation of the atomic bomb has resulted in many lifesaving technologies.

The atomic bomb, the most destructive invention in history, is a good example of technology’s dual nature. The bombs dropped on Japan during the Second World War killed hundreds of thousands and instilled a chill that caused millions to live in fear for decades. But the technology behind the weapon has evolved over the years to the point where it now promises to heal as well as harm.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, about 80 kilometres west of San Francisco, has been researching nuclear weapons for more than half a century. The lab was founded in 1952, in the midst of the Cold War, to augment the work being done at the Los Alamos base in New Mexico, where the original bomb was created. Physicist Ernest Lawrence, a key figure in the building of the weapon, had set up a lab at the Berkeley campus of the University of California modelled on the process used in the Manhattan Project. His multidisciplinary team of scientists pursued large-scale research, leading to some early successes, including the creation of small nuclear warheads that could be launched from submarines, more powerful computers and strides in fusion energy.

In the ’60s Livermore scientists broadened their research into peaceful uses of nuclear power and the effects of radiation on humans, and in the ’70s they expanded into lasers. Today, the lab is one of the pre-eminent laser facilities in the world, prompting some to joke that LLNL doesn’t actually stand for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory but rather Lasers, Lasers ’n’ Lasers. In 1992, after the United States stopped nuclear testing, Livermore, Los Alamos and the Sandia lab in New Mexico were charged with overseeing the Stockpile Stewardship Program, an ongoing project to maintain the safety and reliability of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Livermore has produced a plethora of weapons technology. But, as with all such science, there has been a considerable upside as well — the lab has churned out beneficial mainstream technologies by the truckload. Dyna, a collision-modelling software program, is just one example. Developed in 1976, the program gave scientists a way to measure how bombs respond to ground impacts or how the weapons’ nose cones react when they hit. This sort of data is vital in munitions design because engineers need to know how the weapons will explode against different surfaces such as concrete, sand or metal. Early versions of the software did simple numerical analyses, but as the ’80s came and computers acquired graphical interfaces, these evolved into visual representations. It didn’t take Livermore scientists long to realize the possible commercial applications of the software and in 1980, they began sharing it with industry.

Car companies were the first to jump on board. Because actual car-crash simulations are expensive — up to $1-million or more each — the companies were keen to try out the virtual equivalent. “They realized that they can do practical crash analysis using a simulation tool,” says Ed Zywicz, one of Livermore’s Dyna programmers. As the software’s code is available for free, it spread quickly through the industry and has been in perpetual development since, with improvements shuttling back and forth between the lab and companies.

So are carmakers contributing to building weapons by giving code improvements back to Livermore? “Definitely,” Zywicz says. “There’s give and go in both directions.”

The software, and variations such as the French-designed Radios, is now being used by just about every company that needs to predict collisions. It is used by train makers, by Boeing to see how bird impacts affect jet engines and even by Coors to simulate beer-can mishaps on production lines. It’s hard to gauge how many lives Dyna has saved, but it must be many.

Livermore’s biggest contribution to the civilian sector has been in genetics, a field it got into naturally when it began exploring the effects of radiation on human physiology. In the early ’90s, scientists at the lab made a huge breakthrough with the invention of “chromosome painting,” a process that allows researchers to label individual chromosomes with fluorescent “tags,” thereby making them more visible. The technology, which was licensed and made available to industry relatively cheaply — one “painting kit” for 20 tests sold for just $400 in 1992 — greatly simplified the identification of disease and genetic defects. Through the ’90s, scientists used kits to identify the genes behind a host of health issues, including muscular dystrophy, kidney disease, migraines and dwarfism, which helped in the development of many treatments.

Livermore’s genetic research was a key factor in launching the Human Genome Project, an initiative to map the full human DNA sequence. Scientists at the lab began mapping out chromosome 19, one of the 23 pairs humans have, in 1987. When the worldwide project was launched in 1990, Livermore was given the responsibility of mapping out three full chromosome pairs. The project was completed in 2000, ahead of schedule, and the results are only now starting to be understood. This research has deepened our fundamental understanding of human biology, and its potential applications are vast. In the years ahead, scientists may use the knowledge that stems from it to stamp out many diseases, with the ethical debates about whether they should do so sure to follow.

Today, Livermore sprawls over a 333-hectare campus and employs more than 7,000 people, half of whom are scientists, with an annual budget of about $1.5-billion. Researchers there are now promising to revolutionize treatment of that age-old scourge of humanity: cancer. With all sorts of lasers and other beams at their disposal, they have developed a cancer treatment method that uses protons instead of x-rays. The technology was first used to determine the safety of nuclear missiles by scanning their insides with proton beams, but researchers eventually discovered the same trick could be applied to humans.

The problem with x-rays, according to George Caporaso, who leads the lab’s proton project, is that they aren’t very accurate when blasting cancer cells. If you hit someone with an x-ray beam, a lot of the rays are absorbed by the surface of their skin while others penetrate beyond the cancer cells, deeper into the body than desired. Proton beams can be modulated so that they enter the body at a low frequency, spike in intensity just as they hit the cancer cells, then quickly wane afterward. The difference, which is “revolutionary, not evolutionary,” is like using a scalpel rather than a baseball bat to slice away cancer cells, Caporaso says. “I’m not a medical physicist, but from what I know about it, it is paradigm-changing.”

In 2007, Livermore commercialized the technology through a licensing agreement with TomoTherapy, a Wisconsin-based cancer treatment company. The proton-accelerator machines are still huge and expensive — they’re as big as a basketball court and cost upward of $200-million, which means that as of 2009, there were fewer than 30 treatment centres worldwide and therapy was generally only available to the wealthy. Caporaso and his team are working to bring the size and price tag down over the next few years. They’re aiming for a machine that is only two metres long and costs $20-million, which will make proton cancer therapy available to the general public.

There probably isn’t a better example of technology’s dual nature than Livermore. On one hand, scientists there have aided with inventions that can destroy the world many times over; on the other, they’re working diligently to save lives and improve the world. Zywicz sums it up best: “It’s amazing how all the defence applications over the years have spun off into things like Dyna, which are so vital and useful to the civilian section. Without that defence-research spending, it never would have happened.”

In Sex, Bombs and Burgers: How War, Porn and Fast Food Created Technology as we know it, author Peter Nowak, senior writer, science and technology for CBCNews.ca, and a former Financial Post reporter, argues that most of the major technological advances in the past 60 years have stemmed from this trio of billion-dollar industries. In this excerpt, he writes that the creation of the atomic bomb has resulted in many lifesaving technologies.

The atomic bomb, the most destructive invention in history, is a good example of technology’s dual nature. The bombs dropped on Japan during the Second World War killed hundreds of thousands and instilled a chill that caused millions to live in fear for decades. But the technology behind the weapon has evolved over the years to the point where it now promises to heal as well as harm.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, about 80 kilometres west of San Francisco, has been researching nuclear weapons for more than half a century. The lab was founded in 1952, in the midst of the Cold War, to augment the work being done at the Los Alamos base in New Mexico, where the original bomb was created. Physicist Ernest Lawrence, a key figure in the building of the weapon, had set up a lab at the Berkeley campus of the University of California modelled on the process used in the Manhattan Project. His multidisciplinary team of scientists pursued large-scale research, leading to some early successes, including the creation of small nuclear warheads that could be launched from submarines, more powerful computers and strides in fusion energy.

In the ’60s Livermore scientists broadened their research into peaceful uses of nuclear power and the effects of radiation on humans, and in the ’70s they expanded into lasers. Today, the lab is one of the pre-eminent laser facilities in the world, prompting some to joke that LLNL doesn’t actually stand for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory but rather Lasers, Lasers ’n’ Lasers. In 1992, after the United States stopped nuclear testing, Livermore, Los Alamos and the Sandia lab in New Mexico were charged with overseeing the Stockpile Stewardship Program, an ongoing project to maintain the safety and reliability of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Livermore has produced a plethora of weapons technology. But, as with all such science, there has been a considerable upside as well — the lab has churned out beneficial mainstream technologies by the truckload. Dyna, a collision-modelling software program, is just one example. Developed in 1976, the program gave scientists a way to measure how bombs respond to ground impacts or how the weapons’ nose cones react when they hit. This sort of data is vital in munitions design because engineers need to know how the weapons will explode against different surfaces such as concrete, sand or metal. Early versions of the software did simple numerical analyses, but as the ’80s came and computers acquired graphical interfaces, these evolved into visual representations. It didn’t take Livermore scientists long to realize the possible commercial applications of the software and in 1980, they began sharing it with industry.

Car companies were the first to jump on board. Because actual car-crash simulations are expensive — up to $1-million or more each — the companies were keen to try out the virtual equivalent. “They realized that they can do practical crash analysis using a simulation tool,” says Ed Zywicz, one of Livermore’s Dyna programmers. As the software’s code is available for free, it spread quickly through the industry and has been in perpetual development since, with improvements shuttling back and forth between the lab and companies.

So are carmakers contributing to building weapons by giving code improvements back to Livermore? “Definitely,” Zywicz says. “There’s give and go in both directions.”

The software, and variations such as the French-designed Radios, is now being used by just about every company that needs to predict collisions. It is used by train makers, by Boeing to see how bird impacts affect jet engines and even by Coors to simulate beer-can mishaps on production lines. It’s hard to gauge how many lives Dyna has saved, but it must be many.

Livermore’s biggest contribution to the civilian sector has been in genetics, a field it got into naturally when it began exploring the effects of radiation on human physiology. In the early ’90s, scientists at the lab made a huge breakthrough with the invention of “chromosome painting,” a process that allows researchers to label individual chromosomes with fluorescent “tags,” thereby making them more visible. The technology, which was licensed and made available to industry relatively cheaply — one “painting kit” for 20 tests sold for just $400 in 1992 — greatly simplified the identification of disease and genetic defects. Through the ’90s, scientists used kits to identify the genes behind a host of health issues, including muscular dystrophy, kidney disease, migraines and dwarfism, which helped in the development of many treatments.

Livermore’s genetic research was a key factor in launching the Human Genome Project, an initiative to map the full human DNA sequence. Scientists at the lab began mapping out chromosome 19, one of the 23 pairs humans have, in 1987. When the worldwide project was launched in 1990, Livermore was given the responsibility of mapping out three full chromosome pairs. The project was completed in 2000, ahead of schedule, and the results are only now starting to be understood. This research has deepened our fundamental understanding of human biology, and its potential applications are vast. In the years ahead, scientists may use the knowledge that stems from it to stamp out many diseases, with the ethical debates about whether they should do so sure to follow.

Today, Livermore sprawls over a 333-hectare campus and employs more than 7,000 people, half of whom are scientists, with an annual budget of about $1.5-billion. Researchers there are now promising to revolutionize treatment of that age-old scourge of humanity: cancer. With all sorts of lasers and other beams at their disposal, they have developed a cancer treatment method that uses protons instead of x-rays. The technology was first used to determine the safety of nuclear missiles by scanning their insides with proton beams, but researchers eventually discovered the same trick could be applied to humans.

The problem with x-rays, according to George Caporaso, who leads the lab’s proton project, is that they aren’t very accurate when blasting cancer cells. If you hit someone with an x-ray beam, a lot of the rays are absorbed by the surface of their skin while others penetrate beyond the cancer cells, deeper into the body than desired. Proton beams can be modulated so that they enter the body at a low frequency, spike in intensity just as they hit the cancer cells, then quickly wane afterward. The difference, which is “revolutionary, not evolutionary,” is like using a scalpel rather than a baseball bat to slice away cancer cells, Caporaso says. “I’m not a medical physicist, but from what I know about it, it is paradigm-changing.”

In 2007, Livermore commercialized the technology through a licensing agreement with TomoTherapy, a Wisconsin-based cancer treatment company. The proton-accelerator machines are still huge and expensive — they’re as big as a basketball court and cost upward of $200-million, which means that as of 2009, there were fewer than 30 treatment centres worldwide and therapy was generally only available to the wealthy. Caporaso and his team are working to bring the size and price tag down over the next few years. They’re aiming for a machine that is only two metres long and costs $20-million, which will make proton cancer therapy available to the general public.

There probably isn’t a better example of technology’s dual nature than Livermore. On one hand, scientists there have aided with inventions that can destroy the world many times over; on the other, they’re working diligently to save lives and improve the world. Zywicz sums it up best: “It’s amazing how all the defence applications over the years have spun off into things like Dyna, which are so vital and useful to the civilian section. Without that defence-research spending, it never would have happened.”