Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-85
LIPPINCOTT: Did you bring people from MIT to your lab
BALTIMORE: I brought some people from MIT and hired some people de novo.
LIPPINCOTT: What about the new Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics Were you
behind that
BALTIMORE: Right. Let’s cover two things—well, but it’s all one—which is fund-raising.
LIPPINCOTT: Oh, right, there was the capital campaign to raise $1.4 billion. Weisman was the
chairman of that
BALTIMORE: Yes. When I came here, as I said, they had already announced the biological
sciences initiative, which was a sort of test campaign, from a financial point of view, and was an
attempt to shore up the facilities for biology, and the range of biology, on the campus. It was
consciously an integrative activity—to help engineering get into biology, to help other people get
into biology.
LIPPINCOTT: Were they trying to get neuroscience
BALTIMORE: No, it was not focused on neuroscience, which already was an existing and very
strong program that was very interdisciplinary. There was a sense to use that as a model, but the
initiative didn’t focus much on neuro itself; it focused on developing the genetic technologies,
and developmental biology, and questions like that—network thinking, synthetic biology, the
new kinds of approaches to biology. There was a commitment to build a new building and to
hire a number of faculty; and ultimately it was a $100-million effort. So that was my first
responsibility when I came here—to carry out the biological sciences initiative. And I certainly
could do that from the point of view of explaining what was going on, but I had to find the
donors and the people who would be interested in supporting that. So that occupied a lot of my
time and energy. It introduced me to Eli Broad.
LIPPINCOTT: That’s when you met Broad