A physicist who once worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been awarded more patents than any previous American, surpassing even the inventiveness of Thomas Edison. The physicist, Lowell Wood, had received 1,085 patents as of July, according to an article by Bloomberg News. That’s one more than Edison ever received, and it doesn’t count Wood's “more than 3,000 inventions awaiting perusal by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office,” according to Bloomberg. A Wikipedia article credits Wood with 1,094 patents, suggesting that nine more patents were credited to him after the Bloomberg article appeared. Wood, a geophysicist by training, was a protégé of the late Edward Teller, a founder of the Laboratory. He is now an inventor with Intellectual Ventures in Seattle. Bloomberg describes him as the “inventor-in-residence” at the company, which is a 15-year-old private partnership that operates investment funds and describes itself as a “leader in the business of invention.” Consistent with a longstanding passion for privacy, Wood declined to be interviewed or to comment for this article. At LLNL, where he joined Edward Teller in 1972, Wood’s intellectual energy and creativity led him to research in an extremely wide range of fields, from strategic defense to energy generation, from astrophysics to cancer therapy, from computer design to interplanetary travel. Those who knew him remember a quick sense of humor, matching Teller’s. At times, he was a practical joker who seemed more like a member of a college fraternity than a serious research scientist. Stories circulated of him racing cars around the mile-square Laboratory site late at night, and hiding in car trunks to pass security checks unnoticed even though he carried an authorized ID badge. His association with Teller was thought to have protected him against serious repercussions from such hi-jinks, while his brilliance and forceful personality made him an able defender of his own research programs when it came time to stand up to critics and compete for funds. He was a superb recruiter of brilliant graduate students attracted to the idea of working on major national problems at a laboratory where they could have access to classified national security information and seemingly limitless resources. In the 1980s, his graduate students could find a comfortably university-like home in his programs, since Wood’s personal habits tended toward late night work fueled by pizza and soft drinks. As a co-author of the seminal Scientific American paper on the potential of using lasers to generate electrical power from small thermonuclear explosions, Wood is credited with helping to establish the concept of laser fusion. As a field of research today, however, this is focused much more on nuclear weapons studies than on electrical energy. He also led early small-scale work on the use of lasers to select and separate uranium isotopes. Some of his other efforts, undertaken at various times in his career at LLNL, include the following: He tried unsuccessfully to develop a novel cancer therapy by bonding tritium, or radioactive hydrogen, to the antibiotic tetracycline, which was known to concentrate in tumors. The goal was to use the antibiotic to deliver a tumor-killing radiation dose. He worked with astrophysicists to develop a concept for harnessing postulated mini-black holes in space in order to generate electrical energy that could be beamed to Earth via microwaves. He worked on bold concepts for settling Mars rapidly and on a limited budget, making enemies at NASA by ridiculing that agency’s approach to space exploration as "brain dead" and excessively cautious. Most controversially, he became deeply involved in strategic defense research, supporting the Reagan Administration effort to try to create an impregnable shield against incoming missiles using rockets, lasers or other means. The program became known informally and sometimes pejoratively as Star Wars. Along with mentor Edward Teller, who for decades had been a lightning rod for anti-weapons criticism, Wood and others were accused in the late 1980s of politicking as much as working on science. Criticism came from inside as well as outside of LLNL aimed at Wood. The turmoil that followed extended beyond scientific findings, involving charges of misreported results on X-ray laser research, as well as of retaliation and restrictions on free speech. Wood worked on other strategic defense efforts as well, including improved communication with remote submarines that could provide “pop up” anti-missile defense, and Brilliant Pebbles, a satellite system intended to defend against warheads once they reached space. Wood left the Laboratory not long after Teller’s death, in 2003. The Bloomberg article says he claims to have known all along that the strategic defense work would never be practical; it bankrupted the old Soviet Union as intended, and “the Evil Empire is now no more,” he is quoted as saying. He makes no apologies for his national defense work at LLNL, although he has turned to less controversial inventions at Intellectual Ventures. The Bloomberg article cited his work on a system for preserving vaccines, a laser-based “fence” for stopping disease-carrying mosquitoes, a way to reduce collisions between cars, geoengineering in the atmosphere to reduce the effects of a warming climate, a means to reduce concussions in young football players, and more. Company co-founder Nathan Myhrvold is said to believe that half or more of Wood's activities “are trying to help the least fortunate people on earth…His ideas have already saved tons of lives and have the potential of saving enormously more.” Both Myhrvold and Wood have a continuing connection with the Tri-Valley, helping to recruit and retain graduate science students for Livermore-based Hertz Foundation’s elite fellowship program.