The Smartest Guy in the Room. (January 13, 2009)

Colleagues say he "always has to be the smartest guy in the room". Of course in an awful lot of cases he is.

Steven Chu realigned the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  Credit: LBNL

When Physics Nobel Laureate Steven Chu agreed to take up president-elect Barack Obama's offer to head the US Department of Energy (DoE) NatureNews' Rex Dalton reports he stipulated that "he would take the job if he could select the approximately 15 political appointees who would direct key DoE components. In the early days of the Bush administration, vice-president Dick Cheney was behind most of those appointments. Instead, "Chu will get to select the smartest people he knows", says Rubin [Eddy Rubin, director both of the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, and of the genomics division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)].

As Mr Dalton reports it, in late November Steven Chu flew to Chicago from Berkeley and spent forty minutes in private with the president-elect. According to Dr Chi, Mr Obama was extremely knowledgeable about energy issues, and their ideas for research on alternative sources were in phase.

Aside from Chu's brilliance -- together with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William Phillips he received the Physics Nobel Prize "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light" -- over the past four years, he has  made over LBNL into a pioneer for alternative-energy research.

Mr Dalton says Tad Patzek, a former researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who clashed with Chu in the past, told him: "He is an unabashed self-promoter, but in fairness, he has been a very effective LBNL director, enlarging the scope of energy research."

And a member of the LBNL staff has commented: "You say something stupid, he smacks you immediately; I've seen him really embarrass people, to a fault."

Being a fly on the wall during meetings of the Obama cabinet could be most entertaining in the coming years. Steven Chu won't be the only one "having to be the smartest guy in the room", but there's a feeling abroad that while Mr Obama may have some difficulty getting the right puppy for the Obama daughters, he'll be pretty good at herding cats.