Best and the Brightest

It sometimes seems as if the days of ambitious government science programs, like the Apollo space missions or the Manhattan Project, have ended. But Rep. Bart Gordon, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee and chair of the Science & Technology committee, believes the United States faces a new challenge in need of government support: finding the fuel of the future. He's proposed a new government entity, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, with the mandate to invest in revolutionary technologies. NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria spoke with him about ARPA-E and why the private sector alone isn't up to the challenge. Excerpts:

ZAKARIA: You ' ve talked about the need for " revolutionary breakthroughs, not just incremental change, " to solve the energy crisis. What kind of breakthroughs are you talking about?
GORDON: We may not know [what they are] right now. Combining solar and nanotechnology could make [solar panels] easier to implement or easier to deploy. Energy storage, too, is a good example. Batteries are monumental in terms of the renewable industry: you're never going to be able to fully use renewables until batteries can store energy for times when the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining. That's one example, but we often don't know what we're going to get from basic research. I think we could get an entirely new fuel.

And to make those advances, you ' ve proposed a new government program.
ARPA-E is an advanced research agency that would be set up in the Department of Energy … with a program director that will have the ability to go to the best and brightest of the country to pick out folks that can crash on different research areas.

There are people who are skeptical, who say this is something the market should do.
These are areas of basic research that we're not seeing the private sector move forward on. It's also a unique opportunity to bring together the public sector, the private sector, industry, the national labs, the universities. By doing that, not only do you make breakthroughs, but you already have this community involved, so they can take it to the next step, to the market.

But Silicon Valley is throwing money at this problem, is it not?
Not at the basic research level. You're seeing them by and large trying to take existing solar research, or whatever the technology might be, and make incremental improvements, not transformational ones. And the other thing that Silicon Valley and private investors can't do is they can't pull in the national labs, the universities. The government has that unique ability. This is what DARPA, an advanced research agency within the Department of Defense, has done.

Why do you think DARPA is a good model for energy research?
DARPA was where the Internet was developed—and when they developed the Internet, they didn't really know all its uses. But they developed this concept and with that basic research, it flourished. GPS was developed at DARPA—again, not knowing at the time how it would blossom and be used for so many commercial purposes.