Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-89
BALTIMORE: My lab is in Braun. The major things [in the Broad Center] are structural biology.
The structural biologists we had on campus moved there, and new ones whom we’ve hired have
gone in there—one of them does cryoelectron microscopy, which gives you a special resolution
ability to look at three-dimensional structure. He’s great. He was a young hire that we made
because we had the building and the commitment. Ultimately, the Moore gift—which we
haven’t gotten to yet, and which was probably the most important thing I did—funded the buying
of equipment for the Broad building; because although we put aside space for these things, we
didn’t have the money to do that. That was the cryoelectron microscope and the magnetic
resonance imaging facility that’s in the basement; we needed another $20 million to do that, and
we got it from the Moore gift; that’s been as important to the campus as anything we’ve done.
So there’s a lot of structural work being done there, and there’s a lot of engineering interface
work being done there—nanoengineering. They’re doing some work using DNA structures in
that building. And then there’s some developmental biology there and some other things.
LIPPINCOTT: How did the capital campaign get started
BALTIMORE: As time went on, it became clearer and clearer to me that Caltech’s financial
model would not support the long-term development of the school and that we needed more
money in our endowment and we needed a real shot in the arm to get our programs in gear—all
of our science programs. In talking about that with the then head of finance and the head of
development, we decided that we just had to have a capital campaign. That was about three
years into my being here, something like that.
LIPPINCOTT: Yes. The kickoff was in 2002, so you must have been talking about it before that.
BALTIMORE: Right. There was a trustee meeting in Hawaii where we sat down and really talked
this thing through—
LIPPINCOTT: And arrived at this $1.4 billion figure
BALTIMORE: No, we didn’t arrive at that right away. We knew it had to be big, but there was an
outstanding question, and that was, What would Gordon Moore do Now, we haven’t talked