About Tom Slick

Visionary philanthropist and entrepreneur Tom Slick founded the Mind Science Foundation in 1958; shortly before his untimely death in a plane crash only four years later, he wrote: 

“I regard the creation of the Mind Science Foundation as the most important undertaking of my life … The human mind has tremendous unexplored potential and I want to go about the discovery and development of that potential in a scientific way.”

 During his action-packed life, Tom Slick:

• Received a Phi Beta Kappa key from Yale University in pre-med biology and took graduate courses at Harvard and MIT.
  
  
• His father was called the “King of the Wildcatters,” and his intuitive feel for Texas oil fields funded Tom Slick’s excellent education. Slick himself inherited some of his father’s intuition, and helped to build Slick Oil company into a multi-million dollar company in the early 1960s.
  
  
• Founded the Southwest Research Institute. Today, the Institute employs more than 3000 people in two million square feet of laboratories, test facilities, and offices, with total revenues of $548 million. It is now the world’s third-largest nonprofit applied research institute, with clients from around the world. In 2003, NASA asked SwRI to conduct the tests that helped discover the causes of the Columbia space shuttle disaster.
  
  
• Founded the Texas Biomedical Research Institute (the former Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research) in 1941, which today supports a staff of nearly 400, including more than 60 PhDs, and a budget of over $50 million. The first baboon-to-human heart transplant took place there in 1984.
  
  
• Launched numerous other business ventures -- including Slick Airways, a cargo carrier; invented and patented the Lift-Slab construction process used for building multi-story buildings even today; and headed a mining company that bought old mines, especially diamond mines. While hunting diamonds in British Guiana in 1956, his plane was forced down and he lived with a native bush tribe until rescued.
  
  
• Authored a number of books, often focused on his vision of world peace. Prentice-Hall published his book Permanent Peace: A Check and Balance Plan in 1958. Funded a Tom Slick World Peace Series of lectures at the LBJ Library (UT-Austin).
  
  
• An intrepid explorer, sponsored two expeditions to Nepal in the late 1950s, hoping to find the Yeti in order to scientifically determine whether it was a legitimate ‘missing link’ between Homo sapiens and earlier primates.