“The lab is the world’s biggest playground for technology,” said Northrup, who joined Lawrence Livermore in 1993 and left about three years later to start the biotech company Cepheid. He is now president and chief executive of the startup MicroFluidic Systems Inc. in Pleasanton, Calif. “I had access to incredible technology, multimillion-dollar equipment … all the things I would need to figure out the problem.”

Resource-rich federal labs foster ingenuity, struggle with fledgling inventions