Word: chu
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...Obama's ambitious plans will ultimately depend on politics, and most scientists are about as adept at Beltway Kabuki as most politicians are at freezing atoms. Chu has already created a miniflap by telling reporters it wasn't his job to badger OPEC about oil prices, and he has struggled to explain why he once called coal a "nightmare." Several of his scientific initiatives have stalled on Capitol Hill, victims of lackluster salesmanship. He got his unofficial welcome to politics in February, during a tour of the University of Pennsylvania's operations facility, when a snippy Vice President Joe Biden...
...Chu does have an inconvenient habit of speaking his mind. At Tsinghua, he told audience members they ought to limit their driving to the weekends, a nonstarter in U.S. politics if ever there was one. In our interview, he suggested that Americans should get over their need for gas-guzzling speed ("Believe me, 0 to 60 [m.p.h.] in 8.5 sec. is fine") and meat-heavy diets ("We really don't need 12-oz. steaks every day") before he realized he was making energy transformation sound like a bummer - and abruptly changed the subject. "I don't want to deliver...
...Chu is also becoming the chief financier for the U.S. clean-energy sector, retooling a sclerotic department to shell out about $39 billion worth of short-term stimulus projects - nearly 150% of its normal annual budget - while reorienting its long-term research and development toward artificial photosynthesis, advanced batteries and other technologies he envisions as low-emissions "game changers." Chu plays up his geeky image - he gave Jon Stewart a Nerds of America Society T shirt on-air - but he's no ivory-tower ingenue. "Energy," he says, "is all about money." He cut his teeth in the entrepreneurial culture...
...Real-World Scientist When Chu was a second-grader in a Long Island, New York, suburb, his father told him, Don't get married until after you get your Ph.D. It was that kind of family; even an aunt whose feet were bound when she was a girl in China became a chemistry professor in the U.S. "It was always assumed that all of us would be science professors," Chu recalled. He has two brothers and four cousins in the U.S., all with doctorates. When I asked how many advanced degrees they have, he asked if a law degree counts...
...Rochester. His father once told him he'd never succeed in physics. "What he meant was, compared to Gilbert," recalls younger brother Morgan, a high school dropout who still earned four advanced degrees by the time he was 25 and is now a renowned litigator. (Read "Energy Secretary: Steven Chu...