Creative Tension

For the most part these days, says Bookbinder, "I can work on things that I think are important without being needled about it. They trust me, and they know that I won't embarrass them, wasting a lot of money and effort. If a project isn't working, I tell them. If I'm out of ideas, if I can't find the right person, I'll tell them. They know I will go figure stuff out that will make money and create jobs.

"This company has a 140-year history of inventors. This company realizes that invention is its whole lifeblood. I can see through a bad boss or two. There are a lot of neat people here. And I have a tremendous amount of fun at what I do."

Indeed, this year Bookbinder received Corning's Stookey Award for outstanding exploratory research, a career honor named to commemorate one of the company's distinguished researchers. Dana Bookbinder is 43 years old.

Miracles of Glass (III)

Sullivan Park is 1.3 million square feet of lab, factory, and office space--about the size of a large suburban shopping mall. The space has been doubled in the past five years, to accommodate a doubling of research funds and staff as Corning refreshes its commitment to innovation.

The halls of Sullivan Park actually smell like a laboratory--with a faint chemical tang--and parts of the place are crowded with people wearing lab coats, shouldering past each other.

The facility has a wide range of capacities--the ability to make glass; to make fiber; to make optical devices; to do molecular, even quantum, analysis of almost any substance. It is a sometimes-

jarring mix of refined science and industrial muscle. There are clean rooms where researchers wear bunny suits; there are places where forklifts and bucket trucks are parked in the halls.

And there are signs everywhere that this is quite serious, sometimes dangerous, business. Sullivan Park has four separate emergency systems, each with its own color code and alarm pulls: fire (red), medical (blue), hazardous materials (yellow), and vacuum (green). Emergency medical teams are in place, and there are depots of paramedic supplies at various points around the building. Stretchers are bolted to the walls, as are cardiac defibrillators.

SCIENTISTS ARE PEOPLE TOO

Adam Ellison's khakis are sprinkled with pin-sized holes, burn marks where liquid glass, thousands of degrees hot, has spattered his pants. He roams the halls of Sullivan Park at a lope--he says he once clocked a typical day of racing between labs at about three miles--a pair of protective goggles slung around his neck. Ellison sounds a little bit like the Cookie Monster, from Sesame Street: He speaks with a perpetual croak, because one of his vocal chords is paralyzed. "It's a problem at Corning," he says wryly, "because if I can't shout, it reduces my ability to argue for my point of view."

A common layman's notion about science is that, as a profession, it might somehow be above personalities, or pettiness, or even substantive disputes. Got a disagreement? Do an experiment. If science is about facts, what's there to argue about?

Plenty, actually. To start, there are the usual questions of what to spend money on, which projects are most important, and which ideas are most promising. Day-to-day bench science may ultimately reach conclusions about things, but arriving at conclusions is a process filled with trial and error. Which approach is quickest? Which is most likely to produce results? Scientists at Sullivan Park spend large chunks of their time not in the lab, but in meetings, trying to sort out such questions.

And the intersection of modern science and modern technology is a surprisingly elusive, shifting crossroad. Scientists at Corning have been studying glass for a century, and each year, more than 1,000 people at Sullivan Park alone produce a huge body of new research. But Corning, like many companies, doesn't quite understand how its products do everything that they do, or why. Bookbinder just recently solved some mysterious and unnerving behavior in the company's optical fiber by discovering that it contains an ingredient-- a contaminant--that no one had ever suspected was there. How much of the "dirt" is in the fiber? So little that Bookbinder had to infer its presence logically. Sullivan Park's millions of dollars' worth of high-powered analysis equipment couldn't detect it, because it is in the parts-per-trillion: the equivalent of 12 inches of the distance from the earth to the sun.

One of the secrets to managing creativity, at least scientific creativity, turns out to be that, like most other kinds of management, it's ultimately all about people. "The downside to any project here," says Ellison, "is almost invariably a human thing. The challenge is to corral all of these egos and make sure that they don't stomp all over each other."