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Richter: denies rift with Washington. Credit: SLAC

Burt Richter, one of the most influential — and certainly the most colourful — of the directors of the Department of Energy laboratories, is to step down next August as director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. He will remain at SLAC, however, working on research and science policy issues.

Richter, who won the 1976 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work at Stanford on developing a particle collider that led to the discovery of the J/ϕ particle, became director of SLAC in 1984 when Wolfgang Panofsky retired. Even though he has been director of SLAC for 14 years, the unexpected departure of such a highly motivated scientific leader created a maelstrom of rumours, in California and Washington, about its true rationale. Stories that Richter had been forced out were dismissed by his former deputy, Sidney Drell, as “a load of nonsense”.

Richter leaves SLAC in good shape, with the B-Factory, a new facility for producing B-mesons, having been inaugurated in October, and an upgrade under way at the laboratory's synchrotron light source. But his departure leaves others to pursue his dream of building the Next Linear Collider (NLC), which many see as the world's next major particle physics accelerator, in California.

Richter had recently learned that the start of the conceptual design phase of the NLC will not be included in the Department of Energy's (DOE's) budget proposal for the year 2000. But he denies that his decision to step down was affected by this or by the most recent of his arguments with his superiors at the DOE — a row with Martha Krebs, the assistant energy secretary, and her boss at the time, Federico Peña, over the allocation of money for science education between the laboratories and DOE headquarters.

“I don't have any problem with the DOE,” Richter told Nature last week. He added that he had been thinking of stepping aside for a couple of years, and told Gerhard Casper, the president of Stanford University, of his decision in the summer.

Richter points out that construction of the NLC is not due to begin until 2003 at the earliest. “The next generation should take care of it now,” he says, adding that he will still be director for another nine months, and intends to keep pursuing research to support the NLC.

Richter has vigorously pursued the idea of building the NLC somewhere in California — SLAC's site is too small to accommodate it — in close collaboration with Japan and other nations. But, according to one government official, Richter has not done enough to engage other US laboratories in the project, and the DOE would like to see more laboratories involved, partly to broaden its political support.

Despite his single-minded pursuit of SLAC's interests, Richter will be missed by other laboratory directors, who admired his chutzpah.

“He has been one of the best and most clear-thinking of the laboratory directors,” says Bill Madia, director of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state. “There's no sugar-coating with Burt — he calls it as he sees it.”

Richter says that, although he has enjoyed supervising research at SLAC, other aspects of the job, which involved dealing with the world outside, “have been interesting but stressful. Your enthusiasm for it reaches a maximum and then begins to get exhausted. Then it is time to step down.”