No More SLAC

I read this in this week's issue of Science (18 July, 2008). It seems that the name "Stanford Linear Accelerator Center" may be gone soon, and it has nothing to do with the fact that it is no longer a particle collider facility.

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, California, will change its name. That’s because the Department of Energy (DOE) wants to trademark the names of its 17 national labs, and Stanford University won’t let DOE claim its name. The impasse is “an example of DOE idiocy,” says Nobelist and former SLAC Director Burton Richter, because the university would protect the name anyway. But DOE has been pushing to trademark lab names for more than a decade, spurred in part by a new law allowing trademark suits against the government, a risk DOE says it is trying to minimize.

Oy vey!

Zz.