Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–182
[Benjamin D.] Santer, who was a MacArthur [“genius” award] Fellow, an E. O. Lawrence award
winner, and he’s extraordinarily good. They’ve lost some of the other players who were roughly
comparable to Ben. They’ve got to rebuild that group, because it’s extremely important that they
do. This is not just an issue of greens versus the not so greens. This is a national security issue.
This affects how we deal with a bunch of other countries that are going to be affected by the
climate. And we’re going to be affected by the climate.
ASPATURIAN: It’s hard getting a lot of people to understand that.
TOMBRELLO: In fact, we’re in the process of figuring out how to replace the person who is
running it with another person who will have more vision. That’s hard, because this woman is a
very good scientist and a very decent person. It is not her science that is being judged. It’s not
her human qualities, which are superb. She’s even a good leader, if you could ignore the fact
they have got to have a strategy. They’ve got to know why they’re hiring the kind of people
they’re trying to hire, because these fields are going to grow.
This is also true in some of the other areas. What’s the future of the weapons program?
We don’t have any of the weapons directorates. But the expertise in the scientific directorates is
matrix-managed—like at JPL. And so because there is roughly only one scientific directorate—
except for lasers, which is separate—those people are pulled out and attached to ongoing projects
as the chemistry and physics experts. It’s extremely important that they hire appropriately, not
only for their own scientific needs but also for the programmatic needs of these other things.
The committee can’t do the strategy. We have got to encourage the directorates or divisions to
do the strategy and we comment on it. Otherwise it would be as if the Caltech visiting
committees tried to determine the strategy for a division. But they certainly should be there to
comment on such strategies. This approach works pretty well at Caltech. It is not working in
certain pieces of this directorate. That’s the biggest challenge. How can you be strategic? Part
of that is predicting the future. Not the long-term future but, you know, the five-year future.
ASPATURIAN: Even that can be daunting enough.
TOMBRELLO: It’s interesting. It’s extremely challenging. It is definitely in the national interest.
You’ve also got to face, in the longer term, what is the real function of the national labs,
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