All those stodgy trappings — and the royal mahogany paneling and leather furniture — never aroused him. No one in America cared what the laboratory lobby looked like and what the scientists' last names were, so long as they produced great science. In America, Breeze was more at home than he ever was in Britain. "Here it's 'On with the job!' That's what I like."
THE BREEZE REIGN
For all but a few of today's scientists, it's not about the money. It doesn't matter if you earn a million per year if five years down the road you are less employable than you were when you started. It's about science, but also, apparently, the glory. "They all want the glory," Breeze asserts. "That's what the whole thing is sold on today, and as director, your job is to provide that." To reach scientific brilliance, you need the proper tools, and that means expensive equipment. Most scientists do not question their ability; what they do question is whether a potential employer can offer the equipment and support they need.
Dr. Breeze's theory, honed in his first career post in the New World, went like this: institutions like Yale and Columbia, because of their reputations, have no problem recruiting postdoctorates for their three-year apprenticeships with lab chiefs. In this regard, America was little different from the Old World. Elsewhere down the ladder of prestige, that isn't quite the case; competition is fierce among the rest, and to prevail, a lab director must deliver the resources.
In 1984, after just a few years on United States soil, Dr. Breeze rose to chairman of the microbiology department at the Washington State University vet school, where he oversaw twenty-five faculty members. The school had a unique approach to its faculty recruitment that fit well with Breeze's management style. "It was a very entrepreneurial university," he recalls. "You could walk into the president's office and tell him you had a problem and you could cut a deal." He could reduce a salary or eliminate a position altogether and use those funds to buy an electron microscope for a star faculty member. Utilizing this flexibility, Dr. Breeze built the best department of its kind in the nation. In the mid-1980s, however, a new provost arrived. Out went the freewheeling philosophy. Now, over half of Breeze's powerhouse faculty was being courted by rival universities and bombarded with lucrative job offers.
On a cold January morning Breeze went to the provost's office to plead his case. "Listen," he said in his deep Scottish-sounding brogue. "You have to give us the flexibility we once had — please — or we're going to lose our people!" The provost leaned over his desk and lectured his spunky department chair. "Roger, you need to understand something. WSU is never going to be a great university. We're going to be a place where people pass through to achieve their best elsewhere. You've done a fantastic job developing these people — really you have — but you'll have to accept that." Breeze could hardly believe his ears. What the provost was really saying was that there's a cap on one's success, that one could go no further. And in America, no less!
"I told him, 'I have never heard so much bullshit in all my life.' " Breeze turned and walked out of the provost's office, feeling like he was back at Glasgow. He trudged back to his campus office, darting between waist-deep snowdrifts. He spied an orange slip of paper on the windshield of his car parked out in front of the quaint brick vet school building. "What the hell is this?" he yelled out. It was a $10 parking violation: Parking Without a Permit. "When it snowed," recalls Breeze, "they only brushed off the windshield on the driver's side looking for the permit." His parking permit had slid to the other side of the dashboard.
The ticket was enough to push Breeze over the edge. "I absolutely became unglued." Breeze stormed up to his office and resigned his chair. Previously, the USDA had asked him to run the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. He had responded by asking, "Are you crazy?" The gig came with a $20,000 pay cut, made worse by a cross-country move and a huge cost-of-living increase. Now he was the crazy one. Breeze renounced his British citizenship, pledged allegiance to the United States, and cast his lot with Plum Island, an island monarchy all his own. To Breeze, unless one's science was "the very best in the field," one's career was finished. He left WSU, taking with him the "entrepreneurial style" he perfected there.
"The whole management style I have is this — you have to go in, not just with money, but with resources." He could help the USDA deliver those resources at Plum Island. Or, as one familiar with Breeze puts it, "He could go up there and kick some ass."
When Roger Breeze arrived, he found Plum Island's laboratories "literally falling into the sea." Turning Plum Island into a gleaming new facility would take a tremendous financial effort, and money was unavailable. "Nobody said to me, 'Come to Plum Island and we'll pour money into it….' Washington thought the money they poured in gave them more of the same — the same science that wasn't good enough." The goal then would be to take Plum Island's small budget and stretch it as far as possible, to lure the best scientists with new lab equipment, and keep them happy once they arrived. "I told [USDA headquarters] we either have to do it this way or recruit only Czechs, because this place looks like Prague in 1956 and they'll feel right at home here." Meanwhile, the National Academy of Sciences, having excoriated Plum Island, said it couldn't be fixed and urged it be closed down. While Breeze spoke persuasively to the skeptics about how the island would turn around, privately he harbored doubts. He knew all eyes were on him, looking for his tenure to end in disaster. His first failure could very well be his last.
Taking over the Plum Island kingdom, Roger Breeze had put himself up against the proverbial wall. He had some snake oil to sell. The question was, could he sell it?
The first thing Breeze's "science first for glory" regime did was tear apart Plum Island's budget. Since the Army had left Plum Island in 1954, ongoing funding problems were par for the course. Dismayed over early cuts in his budget, Doc Shahan said, "The project may stand or fall, depending on adequate support in the beginning….[USDA] cannot properly discharge its responsibilities without such a facility as Plum Island which is at present only an infant facing gargantuan tasks."
When Dr. Callis first took the reins in the 1960s, he too felt the money crunch: "For the last several years, the salaries of wage board employees have increased annually… [but] our budget has not been increased by an amount equivalent… " And in the 1980s, Dr. Shope's advisory board proposed Plum Island prepare two budgets — one outlining the costs of a mainland laboratory, and another showing the additional costs of operating a facility on an island, in an effort to sway Congress into properly funding Plum Island. This way, Congress could understand why it had to fork over such large chunks of money to support functions as compared to research. Without the necessary funds, said the advisers, Plum's mission could be "jeopardized."
To raise Plum Island from its depths, Breeze first focused on where the money was going. For this, he needed a crack accountant, a brilliant numbers guy. Enter John Patrick Boyle, known as one of the best number crunchers in the business. An Irishman of medium build, with a frosty white beard, Boyle in his heavy Boston accent recalls Breeze's offer: " 'You'll have to build it up from nothing, John,' he said to me. 'It presents a real challenge.' " As they discussed the opportunity, something about the Scot (though he was really a north-Englishman, everyone thought him a Scot) captivated Boyle. He saw in Breeze a rarity in government service — a visionary with an ambitious plan, backed up with the enthusiasm and an uncanny relentless drive to carry it through. Boyle signed on.