Biography of David Baltimore

Name: David Baltimore
Bith Date: March 7, 1938
Death Date:
Place of Birth: New York, New York, United States
Nationality: American
Gender: Male
Occupations: virologist

David Baltimore

The American virologist David Baltimore (born 1938) received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work on retrovirus biochemistry and its significance for cancer research.

David Baltimore was born on March 7, 1938, in New York City, the son of Richard I. and Gertrude (Lipschitz) Baltimore. While still a high school student, he spent a summer at the Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, experiencing biology under actual research conditions. This so affected him that upon entering Swarthmore College in 1956 he declared himself a biology major. Later he switched to chemistry to complete a research thesis and graduated in 1960 with a B.A. and high honors. Between his sophomore and junior years at Swarthmore, he spent a summer at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, where the influence of George Streisinger led him to molecular biology.

Baltimore spent two years of graduate work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in biophysics, then left for a summer with Philip Marcus at the Albert Einstein Medical College and to take the animal virus course at Cold Spring Harbor under Richard Franklin and Edward Simon. He then joined Franklin at the Rockefeller Institute, completing his thesis by 1964 and staying on as a postdoctoral fellow in animal virology with James Darnell.

In 1965 he became a research associate at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies, working in association with Renato Dulbecco. Here he first met Alice S. Huang, with whom he also conducted research. He and Huang were married on October 5, 1968, and that same year they returned to MIT, where he held the position of associate professor of microbiology until 1971. In 1972 he rose to full professorship, and in 1974 he joined the staff of the MIT Center for Cancer Research under Salvador Luria.

Received Recognition for Cancer and Immunology Research

Baltimore received many awards for his work. In 1971 he was the recipient of the Gustav Stern award in virology, the Warren Triennial Prize, and the Eli Lilly and Co. award in microbiology and immunology. A year after being promoted to full professorship at MIT, he was awarded a lifetime research professorship by the American Cancer Society. In 1974 he was presented with the U.S. Steel Foundation award in molecular biology and the Gairdner Foundation Annual Award. Baltimore's most prestigious award came in 1975 when he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with Howard M. Temin and Renato Dulbecco for research on retroviruses and cancer. Much of this work concentrated on protein and nucleic acid synthesis of RNA (ribonucleic acid) animal viruses, especially poliovirus and the RNA tumor virus. His research demonstrated that the flow of genetic information in such viruses did not have to go from DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) to RNA but could flow from RNA to DNA, a finding which undermined the central dogma of molecular biology--i.e., unilinear information flow from DNA to proteins. This process came to be called, facetiously, "reverse transcriptase."

Baltimore's interests later took him further into the study of how viruses reproduce themselves and into work on the immune systems of animals and humans, where he concentrated upon the process by which antibodies may develop. Central to much of this work was DNA technology, in which he maintained an active interest.

Baltimore proved himself an effective educator, conducting seminars with graduate students and younger colleagues. He also became successful at directing research rather than doing it himself, again working closely with students.

Research Debacle

In 1989 Thereza Imanishi-Kari, a colleague with whom he co-authored a 1986 paper on immunology for Cell, was charged with falsifying data. Imanishi-Kari, an MIT assistant professor, was absolved when a top government ethics panel declared they found no wrongdoing in 1996. Although Baltimore was never implicated in any wrongdoing, the incident caused him to withdraw the paper. He was also pressured by colleagues to resign from his presidency at New York's Rockefeller University, which he did in 1991, although he continued to teach there until 1994. In 1998 Daniel Kevles, a humanities and scientific policy professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) who had followed the case closely, wrote The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character. Kevles investigated the events and proposes that Imanishi-Kari and Baltimore were unjustly given a bad name.

Baltimore Chairs AIDS Vaccine Research Panel

In December 1996, Baltimore became the head of a new AIDS vaccine research panel for the Office of AIDS Research at the National Institutes of Health. The panel was formed to step up the search for an AIDS vaccine. He also became the president of Caltech in 1997 after working at MIT as a biology professor since 1994.

Baltimore was one of the recipients of the 1999 National Medal of Science and Technology. He was honored for his discoveries in molecular biology, immunology, and virology. The award is the United States' highest for science and technology.