Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–92
TOMBRELLO: I was asked if I would step down. I lost a vote of confidence, shall we say, with
Willy and Gerry Wasserburg. To be blunt, the Kellogg grant got into financial trouble. We had
gotten cut. They had given us a raise, which we’d had for a couple of years.
ASPATURIAN: This was the NSF?
TOMBRELLO: Yup. And then they cut it. Suddenly, we are in a leveraged position, and I ask
everybody what they could do to spend less money. And Wasserburg had been getting maybe
$200,000 a year, something like that. I basically assessed everybody with a 10-percent cut. And
Gerry just could not accept going from $220,000 to $200,000. Burnett [Donald Burnett,
professor of nuclear geochemistry, emeritus] was cut out entirely. He had more to complain
about. He’d been probably getting $30,000 or $40,000. It was a bit of an empire. We tried to
integrate intellectually the stuff that Wasserburg and Burnett were doing with the nuclear
astrophysics, because it did fit. But that’s how I lost Wasserburg. And Willy just wanted
everything to go to nuclear astrophysics, and he couldn’t understand why I just didn’t move the
money over from some of these other grants that supported doing radiation damage and lunar
samples and stuff. I just wanted to get this thing down to a level of where we could support
what we had, and it was going to be, hopefully, a short-term thing.
But anyway, there were people who were unhappy. I have my own management style.
It’s not necessarily quite democratic. I consider democracy a spice. I mean I consider it a basic
ingredient. I think it makes things work better, and I think, used sparingly, it’s nice. The rest of
the time, somebody’s actually got to make decisions and not just vote on things or ask opinions.
I’m not sure I asked anybody’s opinion about hiring Koonin, but I think it was a good move.
[Laughter] It’s worked out well. It was that kind of thing. After I left, and I described what
happened in an earlier interview [Session 2], Koonin and Barnes tried to run Kellogg, and their
styles were just so different. I think Koonin basically said that he could not work with
Wasserburg and Barnes. And so suddenly the group did not have Wasserburg in it, and it did not
have Barnes running it. Koonin took over the group. Then things in Kellogg began to take on a
completely different direction, going more into high-energy nuclear physics. Koonin was putting
his stamp on it. By then Willy had won the Nobel Prize [1983].
ASPATURIAN: So we’re in the mid-1980s now.
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Tombrello_T