Tom’s remarkable career at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) spanned more than 65 years. Born in New York City on 21 September 1930, he was the only child of a Czech immigrant father and Hungarian immigrant mother. After his father lost his engineering job during the Great Depression, the family moved several times before settling in Chicago, where Tom attended high school and the University of Chicago. He then attended Harvard Medical School, was a medical intern at Massachusetts General Hospital, and arrived at the NIH in 1956 as a ‘Yellow Beret’ Clinical Associate in the Metabolism Branch of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Tom’s best friend, Sherman Weissman (Yale University), was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and joined Tom as a medical school classmate and Clinical Associate at the NIH, with each being best man at the other’s wedding. Tom married his soulmate, Katharine (‘Kiffy’) Spreng Waldmann, who was his medical resident when he was an intern and who pre-deceased Tom by just over a year after 62 years of marriage.
Tom became a tenured Senior Investigator in 1959 with what he considered to be relatively limited research experience. He said that he never had a true mentor but learned from conversations in the corridors and cafeteria and from his technicians and fellows. In the 1950s, immunology was a backwater field: the function of lymphocytes was unknown, and key molecules that mediate the immune response were not defined, but Tom was driven by the power of the polio vaccine in eliminating epidemics and the potential of harnessing the immune system. In 1971, Tom became Chief of the Metabolism Branch, which in 2014 was renamed the Lymphoid Malignancies Branch; he served as its head until 2019, when he became Chief Emeritus.
