Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–75
TOMBRELLO: I think it must have started with Charlie Lauritsen.
ASPATURIAN: And what was he like?
TOMBRELLO: I was impressed by him. Of course, he was very smart and very quick. Very
social. He tended to really run things when he was around. When I came back from Yale, I was
still a postdoc, but they almost immediately started including me in the weekly meetings of the
Kellogg faculty, and I think he was responsible for that. I was very pleased to be included. I
remember one day I had an idea about something and I said what it was, being brash. And Willy
jumped all over it. He trounced it; this was the dumbest idea he had heard of , and that all went
on for a while, and then finally Charlie Lauritsen said very slowly, “Well, be that as it may,
Willy, the kid is right.” It was my victory. I got few victories, but that was one. But then I
realized that underneath it all, the rock on which Kellogg was built was Charlie Lauritsen.
Charlie had the reputation of having built the lab. In the 1930s he had built the X-ray
project. Anybody who was ever treated with cobalt-60 X rays—a low-energy gamma ray—
probably owes a lot to the history of what was done in the Kellogg project. However, it was not
a very successful project. They only used it to treat patients who were going to die anyway, and
I suspect in many cases they died a little bit sooner, because in those days they didn’t know
anything about the dose regime you were supposed to have. They were learning all that, and like
many cancer therapies you don’t know until you’ve tried it whether it’s actually prolonging life
or shortening it a bit. But people are desperate enough that they want to find a solution, and that
was one of the early X-ray therapy solutions to try to cure cancer. That continued until World
War II, but once Kellogg really got into nuclear physics, they lost interest in the X-ray work,
partly because medically it was not an immediate success and also because nuclear physics had a
lot more promise.
Basically, when I got there, a lot of the equipment was just beginning to change. Some of
it was like the stuff I’d seen at Rice—surplus stuff from the war. People had bought amplifiers
and electronics that were really vintage 1940s, and they were just beginning to change that. So
there was new equipment, new accelerators, and lots of bright young students, because there was
money—in this case from the Office of Naval Research. So why would the ONR give money for
our research? Well, I heard it this way from an admiral, who was one of their sponsors: “You
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