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Thomas B. Slick Jr. papers donated to UTSA

The family of Thomas Baker Slick Jr., founder of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute and other science organizations in San Antonio, has donated his papers to the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Libraries Special Collections.  The transfer was scheduled for August 12, 2011.

The 75 boxes contain papers related to Texas Biomed, Southwest Research Institute, Mind Science Foundation, and other partnerships, and corporations. They include documents relating to the disbursement of the estate assets and the trusts of Slick, who died in a plane crash in 1962 at age 46. The collection also reflects Slick’s interest in world peace, the paranormal, Arabian horses, breeding cattle, the birth control pill, and more.

The papers will be available to scholars and researchers who are interested in  the origins of the biomedical and scientific enterprise in San Antonio and South Texas, the oil and gas industry, the history of the research institutions that Slick  established, and his varied other interests. Slick left a vast set of correspondence spanning from 1938 to 1962, and this donation represents the first time after nearly 40 years that it will be available. The documents had been housed and preserved at the Preston G. Northrup Memorial Library at Texas Biomed, formerly the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research.

“We are very pleased that these papers, which are so important to the history of San Antonio, will be housed in a state-of-the-art facility where historians and others will have access to them,” said Kenneth P. Trevett, Texas Biomed’s president and CEO. “Tom Slick was a remarkable visionary who really thought San Antonio would become a city of science and health, which indeed it has.”

“This gift is important to UTSA for a number of reasons,” says Krisellen Maloney, Ph.D., UTSA’s dean of libraries.  “The addition of Tom Slick’s papers to our special collections will enhance the work of any researcher interested in the urban development of San Antonio. The materials are particularly valuable to us, given our status as a rising premier research university with strong engineering and biotechnology programs.”

The University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries preserve the legacies of San Antonio and South Texas through special collections featuring a rich array of primary resources.  Strengths of the collections—which are open to academic and casual researchers alike—include San Antonio history, urban development and architecture, regional authors, Mexican cookery, women and women’s history, and the Texas-Mexico border region.   Please contact the UTSA Libraries Special Collections at (210) 458-5505 or 458-2228 for information on how to access the Slick papers.

Texas Biomed is one of the world’s leading independent biomedical research institutions dedicated to advancing health worldwide through innovative biomedical research.  Located on a 200-acre campus on the northwest side of San Antonio, Texas, the Institute partners with hundreds of researchers and institutions around the world, targeting advances in the fight against AIDS, hepatitis, malaria, parasitic infections and a host of other infectious diseases, as well as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, psychiatric disorders, and problems of pregnancy.  For more information on Texas Biomed, go to www.TxBiomed.org, or call Joe Carey, Texas Biomed’s Vice President for Public Affairs, at 210-258-9437.