Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-58
and the profits from the company have to go to the institute’s needs. So Jack said, “Fine. I’ll
form an institute and I’ll appoint, to head the foundation that controls the institute, my friends”—
which was what Howard Hughes did—“or my kids, and we’ll keep control of the company, and
profits can go to that, that’s fine.” Because there are a lot of ways of getting the money out of it.
LIPPINCOTT: So that was his motivation.
BALTIMORE: That was his motivation. And he did that. He formed the institute at Duke, and
that was the original Whitehead Institute. And it had gone badly, because Jack was a very
controlling person, and he assumed that he could run everything himself—
LIPPINCOTT: Did he want to select the faculty
BALTIMORE: He wanted to select the faculty; he wanted to do it all. Duke bought into this
thing—because there was a lot of money involved—and didn’t put in place academic safeguards.
So they were at loggerheads. And finally Duke said, “We can’t have it anymore.” So it reverted
back to Jack. Meanwhile, Revlon had bought Technicon [May 1980], so Jack went from having
a problem to having money—no problem left. But the idea had captured him, and he began to
formulate it not as a tax dodge but as giving back to the community that had made him so
wealthy, because what he had done had come out of the research community from the very
beginning. And he was very close to and really loved the research community—loved his
connections to Rockefeller and the scientists there. That’s how he did these fraction collectors—
because they needed them. So by the time I met him he had money, not a tax problem, and he
had made a decision: “I’m going to give the institute $35 million to build and equip a building
and $100 million endowment.” So that’s where the number came from. He had put together a
committee of elders—Josh Lederberg; Gus [Gustav] Nossal, from Australia; and some others—
to help him find a venue for this thing. But he now knew a lot more: He knew that medical
research, clinical research, was very expensive and generally very far downstream and not
terribly efficient in affecting the treatment of people. But basic research was a very different
story; it cost a lot less to do any individual thing, and when you made a discovery in basic
research, the effects on medicine were profound. So he had been convinced, through his
association with these other people as well as his basic intelligence—he was a smart man, very