Gordon E. Moore, the billionaire co-founder of Intel Corp. and a longtime supporter of Caltech, will give the school two gifts totaling $600 million, the largest donation ever to an American university.
"I'm just so grateful, I don't have words for it," Caltech President and Nobel laureate David Baltimore said of the donation, which was made public Saturday. "It is an amazing gift, really the most wonderful thing that could happen to Caltech."
Baltimore said the gift from Moore and his wife, Betty, will be used to fund a "wish list" of scientific initiatives and projects at the Pasadena school, generally considered one of the world's leading research institutions. It could go toward anything from designing a telescope bigger and more powerful than any now in existence to constructing a plate boundary observatory for geologists to study the movement of the Earth's tectonic plates.
Although many specifics have yet to be negotiated, Baltimore said other possibilities include major initiatives by biologists working to better understand human consciousness and by chemists exploring more systematic methods of making large molecules.
The university also is looking at how it might strengthen its computer science offerings and develop a management program to wed its scientific prowess to areas of finance and economics.
Half of the Moores' donation will come directly from the Silicon Valley pioneer and his wife and half from the San Francisco-based foundation they established less than a year ago.
The gift was announced to Caltech trustees during a weekend board meeting in Palm Springs. Reached there Friday before the news was made public, Moore, 72, said the gift was intended to keep the institution at the forefront of science and technology.
"I've retained a real interest fairly broadly in what goes on in science and technology, and Caltech has been a leading participant in that," he said.
Although he has made donations to other universities over the years, Moore said he wanted to focus his most significant investment at a single institution.
In fact, his is the latest in a series of extraordinary donations to individual institutions of higher education in the United States.
But it easily surpasses record-setting gifts of $360 million to New York's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in March from an anonymous donor and $400 million to Stanford University in May from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, according to a list kept by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
