INTERVIEW

David Baltimore

Interviewed by Melissa Mertl

This article also appears in BioMedNet's Conference Reporter.

Posted August 3, 2001 · Issue 108

Background

Biography
David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) since 1997, shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in physiology with Renato Dulbecco and Howard Temin for the discovery of reverse transcriptase. They showed that some viruses use RNA as a template to insert their own genetic material into host-cell DNA, revealing that transmission of genetic information from DNA to RNA is a two-way street. Baltimore graduated in 1960 from Swarthmore College, and received his Ph.D. in 1964 from Rockefeller University. He held postdoctoral fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He took over leadership of the Whitehead Institute in 1983, returning to Rockefeller University as president in 1990, but left a year later in the wake of a scandal involving a coauthor accused of fabricating data on their paper (Baltimore himself was not accused). The charges were overturned in 1996.

What event led you into research?

I was led into research by a summer research program in Bar Harbor, Maine, when I was still in high school. I had three great research projects, and I basically never looked back.

Who has most inspired and/or influenced your work?

The people at Bar Harbor were fantastic. Tibby [Elizabeth] Russell, a great mouse geneticist who recently died, was one. And later my research advisor Richard Franklin was very important, and then Salvador Luria.

I never actually worked with Luria, but he was one of the people who convinced me to go to MIT . . . and later invited me back onto the faculty. He helped support my work during my whole career, from the time when I was a junior. He was a great man with great vision.

What was your best experiment?

I guess I have to say it was the work that led to the discovery of reverse transcriptase. There were two eureka moments. The first was when I found slightly more signal from the experiment than the control. People looked at it and said that that was just noise. But than I went back the next day and assayed again and found tenfold more activity, and there it was. No one believed me the first time, but every one believed the second. You could see it instantly.

Which scientific idea (yours or others) do you regret the most?

I never really thought about that before. I guess it was an idea that other people held - that the RNA bacteria phage should tell us all we needed to know about RNA viruses, that we didn't have to study polio and flu. They assumed there was nothing new to learn.

That idea was so wrong. I'm just glad I didn't listen to it. I followed my own instincts, and here we are today.

What is the greatest unanswered scientific question?

What is the physical basis of consciousness?

What are your current scientific interests?

I maintain a small research laboratory at Caltech. The problem that is sort of central is the function of NF-kappa B transcription factor, which is central to immunity and which we discovered about 15 years ago. We are currently trying to find out: First, does it play a role in the nervous system? Second, what genes are controlled by this factor? And third, what are the pathways to activation?

What are your professional plans for the next five years?

I plan on staying on as the president of Caltech, which should keep me quite busy. We're in the process of building a new biology building right now, which should be finished next year. And we're moving into behavioral biology strongly. We're also beefing up engineering, especially in the area of information science. We're also talking about developing the next generation telescope, something that would be ten times stronger than anything currently in existence.

We're also building labs to look for gravity waves, something Einstein predicted but that no one has ever detected before.

What are the qualities of a successful researcher?

Passion and energy.

If you could work with any scientist (historical or current), who would it be?

I guess it would be Sydney Brenner. He has so many interesting ideas and such a deep understanding of research. [Brenner was involved in the discoveries of mRNA and the triplet code.]

Melissa Mertl is a former news editor for BioMedNet's News and Comment section. Before joining BioMedNet, she wrote for Science's Next Wave, an online publication for disgruntled postdocs.