Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–197
Lange is PMA chairman. Peter Hero has just come to run Development. I’m sitting on my lanai,
in Kauai and talking to them on a cell phone.
ASPATURIAN: Three-way call.
TOMBRELLO: Three-way call. They want to talk to me about Walter Burke. I said, “Keep in
mind, Walter Burke likes winners. What are you going to propose to him?” They said they were
going to tell him that the endowment, including the endowment for the Fairchild postdocs, has
been hurt. Would the foundation give us money to make up the difference?
I said, “That doesn’t fit with Walter’s personality. You are going to tell Walter that you
have lost 30 percent of his money and that you want him to make it up?” I said, “I don’t
recommend this. Walter likes winners. Go to Walter with something new, and you will
probably get it. Go to him with an admission of failure, and he’s going to politely say no.” And,
of course, that’s exactly what happened.
ASPATURIAN: Really?
TOMBRELLO: Yes. They just didn’t listen. They thought: We’re making a reasonable request of
the foundation to continue a program they started. But they didn’t take into account the
personality of the man running it. I just wanted to jump ahead to this story to tie it to Walter’s
personality.
Anyway, I’d met my first challenge and I started the Witten negotiations. We’re back in
1999 now.
ASPATURIAN: Talk a bit about Ed Witten for a moment.
TOMBRELLO: Well, first, he was an interesting case. He was clearly the top of the string theory
stuff. Before that, he had been on top of a number of other things. He’d won a number of
prizes—not the Nobel Prize but other prizes. He clearly was one of the best people in this field,
and it was not a crazy thing to go after him at the Institute for Advanced Study, and there was
potentially a way to attack it. His wife, Chiara Nappi, was also a theorist, roughly the same field,
but in a non-professorial position. I thought, OK, I don’t think I can get her through Caltech.
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