Island of Ingenuity

IF GEOGRAPHY is destiny, the insular landscape of Long Island seems to have spurred the sort of comfortable, leafy retreats where scientists tend to thrive.

Many of the nation's top geneticists were nurtured in the labs and conference halls dotting the shoreline of Cold Spring Harbor.

World-renowned physicists have probed the atom's core at large research facilities scattered through the scrub oak at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton.

Specialists have investigated the frightening potential of rare and dangerous organisms at the isolated Plum Island Animal Disease Center off Long Island's North Fork.

And researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Polytechnic University in Farmingdale and other campuses and medical centers also have enriched the intellectual vitality of Long Island.

Some measures of the Island's strength in science are tangible: four Nobel Prizes for work at Brookhaven, three at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; the huge particle accelerators at Brookhaven, including the 2.4-mile-around relativistic heavy ion collider that will go on line next year; the annual flocking of topflight scientists to conferences at Cold Spring Harbor.

Others are more subtle, including a community that values education and inquiry. Or the synergism that can occur when research institutions are thrown together by geography.

"Here on Long Island we are sort of trapped," said John Truxal, a distinguished former dean of engineering at Stony Brook. "We very much have to be a self-sufficient community. It sort of encourages scientists and engineers on Long Island to get to know one another."

The history of science on Long Island has been a rich one, touched by some of the great personalities of the 20th Century as well as by researchers who, while working largely in obscurity, were unafraid to challenge convention.

The growth of science on Long Island benefited from the cultural and intellectual resources of New York City, which helped foster some of the Island's fledgling research institutions.

The first -- and still perhaps the most prominent -- was the Cold Spring Harbor Lab. Founded in 1890 by the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences as a summer outpost for marine studies, the laboratory has evolved into one of world's leading centers for the study of molecular genetics. Over the years, most of the great figures in modern biology have walked along Bungtown Road on the lab's grounds.

James D. Watson, who won a Nobel Prize in 1962 after his co-discovery of the structure of DNA was reported in 1953, has been the driving force at Cold Spring Harbor Lab for three decades, first as director, now as president. When Watson took over in 1968, the lab -- despite serving as the focus for pioneering research in the 1940s and 1950s on viruses and DNA -- was in serious financial difficulty.

Watson helped revive the lab's research programs, attracting bright young scientists from around the world, and continuing the pathbreaking symposia that had developed during the 1940s and early 1950s under one of his predecessors, Milislav Demerec. Today, many of the informal discussions take place between established scientists and up-and-coming researchers in wide-ranging courses and scientific meetings stretched out through the year.

"We are a center for training scientists," said Bruce Stillman, who was recently appointed director of the lab after Watson became president. This year's courses, he said, range from rather mundane exercises in gene splicing to exotic studies in epidemiology, mouse genetics, behavioral analysis and cloning.

Science gained another educational foothold on the North Shore in 1957, when the state founded a campus in Oyster Bay to prepare high school math and science teachers. The school moved to a new campus in Stony Brook in 1962, where it grew rapidly -- at times haphazardly -- into a major research university under the direction of physicist John Toll.

Not surprisingly, the physics department became one of the school's jewels, thanks in no small part to the presence of C.N. Yang and to the proximity to Brookhaven National Lab. Yang had done some of his most important work as a visiting scientist at Brookhaven, including a paper written with T.D. Lee in 1956 on a tenet of physics called parity violation that was to win a Nobel Prize.

Brookhaven also had benefited from its proximity to the scientific resources of New York City in its early years. A group of Columbia University physicists -- notably I.I. Rabi -- was instrumental in bringing the government-funded lab to the Army's former Camp Upton after the war, in 1947.

Brookhaven's founders hoped for a spirit of collaboration similar to that during the war, when scientists from various fields had combined efforts. Physicist Ernest Courant, who joined the lab in '48, recalled people from all departments would attend meetings in chemistry, physics and biology. These general-purpose meetings gave way as the disciplines became more specialized, but the collegial spirit remained as the lab expanded.

Brookhaven made its reputation in high-energy physics and nuclear medicine, but its researchers made advances in other disciplines as well. In the '50s Lewis Dahl made fundamental discoveries on links between salt intake and high blood pressure. George Cotzias showed the drug L-dopa could be effective in the treatment of Parkinson's disease in the '60s and '70s.

The lab has taken some intense criticism in the past few years for its environmental record -- in particular, a small leak of radioactive tritium from the spent-fuel pool that resulted in the reactor's shutdown in 1996 -- and a new leadership has been trying to mend ties to the neighborhoods. But it is worth noting one of LI's most influential environmentalists, Dennis Puleston, was a former head of Brookhaven's technical information division.

He was the first chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund, a group founded in a Stony Brook attic in 1967 that included Charles Wurster, a Stony Brook biologist who had studied the effects of the pesticide DDT on songbirds in New Hampshire. The founders had filed a landmark suit that year demanding Suffolk County stop spraying DDT over marshes. Their win and subsequent legal actions led to a nationwide ban on DDT by 1972, establishing a model for the fusing of science and activism that gave birth to a new environmental movement.

The Island's science owes much to basic research -- pursued without regard to immediate payoff -- but also to the many inventive people who have applied science for practical benefit, from the huge Grumman engineering teams that built the Apollo lunar landers to the solitary genius Nikola Tesla, an electrical engineer who set up a research facility in Shoreham early in this century to pursue his dreams of wireless communication. It took more than half a century before the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the Guglielmo Marconi had infringed on some of Tesla's radio patents.

The medical screening technique called magnetic resonance imaging was born on Long Island, thanks to the work of Raymond Damidian of Fonar Corp. in Melville, and Paul Lauterbur, a former chemistry and radiology professor at the State University at Stony Brook.

A transportation technology that could see application in the next century was born out of Brookhaven physicist Jim Powell's frustration at being stuck in one too many traffic jams on the Long Island Expressway. He and colleague Gordon Danby devised a method in the 1970s to use high-strength magnets to levitate and propel high-speed trains. "Maglev" trains have attracted more attention in Japan and Germany -- construction could begin this year on a link between Hamburg and Spandau -- than in the United States.

While Long Island has drawn creative researchers from around the world, it also has been a source of homegrown scientific talent. Students from local schools have done ground-breaking work in labs around the world. They include biologist David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate who is president of the California Institute of Technology; Steven Chu, a Nobel winner in physics at Stanford University, and Dr. Harold Varmus, the director of the National Institutes of Health, also a Nobel laureate.

And as for the next generation, Long Island schools lately have been matching or surpassing their New York City counterparts in the nation-leading production of Westinghouse (now Intel) science prize winners. Young people here, it seems, are still striving to make sense of the world around them.