Creative Tension

The Scientific Mission: Why Brilliant People Create

Adam Ellison's desk is legendary. It's not just that there are stacks of paper and glass samples on the desk. The stacks are really interlocking geologic layers cascading into each other, the material from 6 inches to 9 inches deep. The tops of the stacks are choppy, like a whitecapped sea, and some familiar objects bob into view: a radio, for playing classical music; a boxed 4-CD set of French language lessons; a can of soy-protein powder. The actual surface of the desk itself is invisible.

Ellison's desk is so legendary that fellow scientist Dan Hawtof once played what he thought was a wonderful joke on Ellison. He took a newly hired scientist with him to Ellison's office, and they hid a banana on the desk. (Hawtof's own desk is so clean that it looks as if it was just uncrated.) A week later, amid much hilarity, they reclaimed the banana, considerably riper, but unmoved.

Ellison waves off the prank. "I don't eat bananas," he says. "I knew the banana was there. I figured someone left their banana in my office and would eventually come back and get it." He squints in mock warning: "I know when anyone has touched my desk. I can always tell when someone has disturbed the force."

Nestled atop a hill outside the city of Corning, New York proper, Sullivan Park is a campus of 1,200 people and seven buildings that is devoted exclusively to R&D for Corning. Wandering around, you often stumble into the stereotypes of scientists.

In truth, Americans don't have much exposure to the daily work of scientists, certainly not compared to our exposure, through TV, to the work of detectives, doctors, and lawyers. Popular culture offers a handful of cartoon images: the addled, absentminded scientists of Disney comedies; the idealistic, if isolated, scientists of university labs; and the faintly evil, or at least greedy and corrupt, scientists who work for corporations, or for the villains in James Bond movies.

So scientists like Ellison are striking, in one sense, for the clarity of their motives in working for a big company. Most have rejected academia -- which is a kind of false nirvana, despite the public perception -- for a setting where they can actually accomplish something.

Ellison earned his PhD in geology from Brown when he was just 25, and he worked at Princeton and at Argonne National Laboratory before coming to Corning. "I decided consciously that I wanted to be in a corporation, not at a university," says Ellison. "At a university or a national lab, you can piss away your whole career doing stuff -- important stuff, brilliant stuff -- that doesn't matter. It's just sitting in a journal somewhere, and no one even reads it. Here, someone always cares about what I'm doing."

Division VP David Morse, Ellison's boss one level above Echeverr?a, puts it even more directly: "I aspired to creating jobs -- inventing stuff and creating jobs," he says. Morse, 48, a widely regarded scientist and widely praised manager who has been at Corning for nearly 25 years, joined the company after earning his PhD in inorganic chemistry from MIT at age 23. "As a scientist inside a company, you have fantastic leverage. If you invent things, invent new materials, you can allow the life of a factory to go on -- a place that employs all of those people. That was my motivation," he says.

Two big projects bracket the time that Ellison has been with Corning. When he first arrived -- he takes great amusement in his first day having been April Fools' Day, in 1996 -- he was immediately put on a SWAT team working to solve manufacturing problems with Corning's flat-panel, LCD glass, used in color laptops, in PalmPilots, and, increasingly, in all sorts of wide-screen flat-panel displays. "I'm not sure I even sat down at my desk first," he says.

That, in fact, is one way that Sullivan Park scientists get work: Someone tells them, or, more commonly, asks them, to solve a problem. The freedom that a scientist has to accept or reject such an assignment varies with seniority, the scarcity of the necessary talent, the urgency of the request, the urgency of other projects -- and how much a scientist cares about the consequences of saying no.

The glass in your Apple G3 laptop screen is nothing like the glass in your sunglasses or in your car windshield. LCD glass, in fact, is a classic Corning product. Most consumers don't realize that their color-laptop screen is probably made by Corning, which owns about 70% of the world market for high-end LCD glass.

And how did that cutting-edge glass get its start in life? When a Corning scientist in the mid-1960s let a trough of liquid glass overflow, the glass ran down both sides, rejoined at the bottom of the trough, then flowed down like a giant sheet, hardening into a piece of flawless glass. Neither of its outside surfaces had touched anything but air during its creation.