Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-83
cost was going to be enormous, and we didn’t have any way to pay for it, or any thing that was
compelling to do there. I imagined that various things might happen, but none of those really did
happen. There was not the kind of need for it that I thought there might be in the short run, but
my real interest in this was in the long run, not the short run.
LIPPINCOTT: Right, and there it was, and you had to see if—
BALTIMORE: Right, and if we didn’t do it then, we were never going to do it. Over time, it
became a little bit of a liability, because just maintaining it had a real cost. You had to heat
things and whatever else—keep things in shape.
LIPPINCOTT: Mow the lawn.
BALTIMORE: Yes. The major use for it—and it more or less paid for itself that way—was
filming. Because here was a hospital; and television and movies are full of hospital stuff, and so
they did a lot of filming there and that made us a lot of money. But in the process of really
trying to deal with the financial problems of Caltech, we ultimately decided to sell it—and did.
And in the end we made a fortune, because we sold it before the economic downturn. This
happened while Jean-Lou [Chameau] was president [1997-present]. They found a buyer, and the
buyer paid a lot more than I paid, so it was a huge financial gain for Caltech, but it was at the
cost of going back to not having any expansion space. And I tried to insist that the gained money
be put aside for purchasing land around us, because we do have a lot of buildings, particularly to
the north of us, beyond Del Mar. There are a lot of apartments and whatever there, and we own
a fair amount, and we can continue to aggregate property there. The only thing we’ve built there
is the Financial Services Building, which is just across Del Mar from the campus. But we had
talked about building a child-care center.
LIPPINCOTT: There’s a small one already, on the other side of the street, I think.
BALTIMORE: Yes.
LIPPINCOTT: Where did the 30-meter telescope designers go after they had to vacate St. Luke’s