John Madey, the physicist who invented the tunable free electron laser, has been removed as director of Duke University's Free Electron Laser (FEL) Laboratory in a dispute over how the lab should be managed. Sources say there is conflict over priorities between medical and physics research. Optics professor Robert Guenther has been named acting director.

Madey will no longer be principal investigator at FEL and has been offered the title of "chief scientist" at the Defense Department-funded center. And he is not happy with the new developments. Last week he was in Washington, D.C., discussing his problems with government officials. He will not comment other than to say "negotiations are ongoing," but he is known to be considering taking his laser and locating elsewhere.

Capturing the FEL facility, budgeted at over $3 million a year, was a coup for Duke. Madey built the initial equipment, an infrared FEL called Mark III, when he was at Stanford University and brought it with him to Duke in 1992. He later brought in physicist Vladimir Litvinenko, who is in charge of the center's other laser, a Russian FEL that operates in the ultraviolet range.

The total facility was sold as a medical project, and the goals of the Duke lab were to develop more sophisticated lasers, explore materials, and particularly to develop new surgical techniques and other medical applications. But according to laboratory staffers who asked not to be quoted, the medical promise of the tunable lasers has not panned out as hoped, and some believe it has been oversold. Disagreements over the future direction of the lab have been such that late last year they led, in part, to the shutting down of both machines for over 4 months.

Glenn Edwards, leader of a medical FEL program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, notes that clinicians are still waiting for their first opportunity to conduct a human trial with a FEL. Nonetheless, he thinks medical applications are moving ahead. The Vanderbilt center recently received two major private grants to continue its investigation of laser surgery, and he hopes a clinical trial will be launched in 1999.