Hafiz wished to take it to his corporate laboratories for further analyses and study.

The institute also says that its members are increasingly financing basic research at universities, while cutting back this work at corporate laboratories.

And I.B.M., the world's largest information technology company, is something of a corporate laboratory that highlights the trend.

The company develops, licenses and markets research materials to scientists in academic, corporate and government laboratories.

Development work on specific products is usually left to corporate laboratories, where proprietary discoveries can be kept out of the hands of competitors.

"Right now, it's easy in Vietnam to find a job," he said, pausing while doing a chemical analysis of cement quality at a corporate laboratory here.

Increasingly during the last decade, American corporate laboratories and government agencies have pulled back from supporting basic research.

So discoveries made in huge Government-financed, corporate and university laboratories were treated as proprietary.

As Schriesheim later reflected, Argonne had become "a corporate laboratory for the nation."

"We go off the site to schools and corporate laboratories or academic centers around the region," he said.