and given that the administration has staked its scientific interest on clean energy, what is the argument that you make for Fermilab? B.F.: One of the most important things that you didn't mention, that is actually very important for the Department of Energy's Office of Science [which funds Fermilab], is another problem that it inherited from a previous administration, namely the cost overrun on ITER [the $23 billion international fusion experiment under construction in Cadarache, France]. That is going to put tremendous stress on the Office of Science, and this is something that was more or less imposed politically. And we have to understand if there is a political solution for the added stress of having to deal with the ITER cost overrun. It's not clear what is going to happen to the European and Asian funding and what the real timescale of the project is. How does that play out into the Office of Science budget? That's one of the biggest elephants in the room. Q: But what about the really fundamental physics, which, to be honest, may have little direct technological payoff? Obviously, Fermilab spun off the superconducting wire industry, and that's tremendous. But that is also in the past. And yes, there will be spinoffs from developing advanced detector technology, but it doesn't seem to me that you can really ... B.F.: There's a large class of research that you do either because of very long-term, very speculative payoffs, or because it's what they call curiosity-driven research.