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O'Toole: scientists must “get in the game”. Credit: DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

The senior official responsible for environment, health and safety at the US Department of Energy leaves Washington this week with a warning for scientists: engage with the communities you live in, or face oblivion.

Tara O'Toole, a physician who has spent four years crusading against entrenched practices as an assistant secretary at the department, says scientists need to wake up to what is happening outside laboratory gates.

O'Toole played a key role in initiating a huge, cross-government investigation into the human subjects research that took place in the United States during the Cold War. More recently, she upset some scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory with her aggressive approach to environment problems there.

O'Toole practised and taught medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and then worked on environmental health issues for the congressional Office of Technology Assessment before joining the administration. She was one of a cadre of radical officials sprinkled by President Bill Clinton across his first administration. As this group tires and departs — four years is considered a long time in such positions — it is being replaced, in general, by a more orthodox class of Washington official. O'Toole's successor has yet to be named.

“We ‘baby-boomers’ just haven't been realistic about how difficult it is to change the world,” O'Toole reflects. “I hope more people come forward to do this kind of work.”

Scientists need to accept that “the political process isn't fair” and yet still engage with it, she argues. “It is very important that scientists get in the game. The community of scientists better do what needs to be done to assure the public that its programmes are properly run.”

O'Toole led the Department of Energy's public response when a tritium leak was discovered at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, earlier this year (see Nature 386, 3; 1997). The department responded with high-profile investigations into the management of the laboratory, and soon sacked its managing contractor, Associated Universities Incorporated.

Some scientists at the laboratory believe that the department overreacted, giving encouragement to critics who would like to see it shut down. Nick Samios, who retired as laboratory director in March, said at the time: “Tara is trying to be helpful, but it isn't wise to constantly hold these press conferences. He noted that every one of them led to negative publicity for the laboratory.

O'Toole counters that the department acted to save the laboratory from itself by piercing its complacency about the perceptions of people outside. She says she sympathizes with Brookhaven scientists “to some extent”, especially with graduate students whose projects were wrecked by the suspension of reactor-based research there.

“But the root problem was that scientists at Brookhaven were not engaged with the political realities of the community in which they live,” she says. “I don't think they yet grasp the peril to the laboratory that is posed by the tritium plume — it isn't a threat to public health, but it sure is to the laboratory.”

She also thinks that lessons learned at Brookhaven will eventually come into play for biology, as it comes to resemble ‘big science’. “The Human Genome Project is the beginning of ‘big biology’,” O'Toole says. “Science is no longer a cottage industry.” She predicts biologists engaged in big science will have to engage the public more effectively.

Energy department watchers say O'Toole will be sorely missed. “She was very thorough and committed and brought an incredible amount of technical knowledge to the job,” says one Congressional staffer.

Asked who will continue where she left off at the department, O'Toole replies dutifully that Federico Peña, the energy secretary, and his deputy and probable successor, Elizabeth Moler, “care about openness” and will continue to push for it. But neither Peña, a career politician, nor Moler, a Washington lawyer, is likely to upset the apple-cart at DoE in the manner of O'Toole or Hazel O'Leary, the previous energy secretary.

O'Toole's specialized knowledge helped turn O'Leary's vision of a more open department into reality — especially through the investigation into human subjects research, which eventually embraced the entire federal government. “They fought with the culture [of the laboratories], and it outlasted them,” says the staff member. “But they did make a difference.”