David Baltimore
(1938 - )
David Baltimore was born in New York City
on March 7, 1938. A graduate of Swarthmore
College (BA, 1960), he received his Ph.D.
from Rockefeller University in 1964. From
1965 to 1968, Baltimore worked at the Salk
Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla,
California. In 1968, Baltimore accepted the
postion at MIT as Associate Professor of
Microbiology; he was promoted to Professor
of Biology at MIT in 1972. Since 1973, he
has been the American Cancer Professor of
Microbiology.
In 1975, at the age of 37, while on the
MIT faculty, he received the Nobel
Prize in Medicine, along with Howard
Temin and Renato Dulbecco, for the discovery
of reverse transcriptase, which transcribes
RNA into DNA. This work upset what was until
the early 1970s a widely held dogma: that
DNA led to RNA, which in turn led solely
to proteins. Reverse transcriptase is an
important factor in the reproduction of retroviruses
such as HIV.
While at MIT, Baltimore established the
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
He was an organizer of the Asilomar conference
on recombinant DNA in 1975.
For most people outside of science, Baltimore
is best known for his role in an affair of
alleged scientific misconduct. In 1986, Baltimore
had co-authored a scientific paper on immunology
with Thereza Imanishi-Kari and others. After
Imanishi-Kari was accused of fabricating
data, Baltimore initially refused to retract
the paper (although he did later). Since
the research had been funded by the U.S.
federal government through the National Institutes
of Health, the matter was taken up by the
United States Congress, where it was aggressively
pursued by, among others, Representative
John Dingell. Due to the ensuing controversy,
in 1991 Baltimore was forced to resign from
the presidency of Rockefeller University,
to which he been appointed only one year
earlier. In 1996, an expert panel appointed
by the federal government cleared Imanishi-Kari
of misconduct.
Baltimore has profound influence on national
policy in matters concerning recombinant
DNA research and the AIDS epidemic. Baltimore
was appointed president of the California
Institute of Technology in 1997. He is a
member of the editorial board of Encyclopædia
Britannica.
The following press release from the Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences describes Baltimore's
work:
“The fact that
the viruses can cause tumours was shown
already more than 60 years ago by Rous
in studies of sarcomas and leukemias in
chickens. However this observation was
for a long time regarded as a biological
curiosity and not until during the 1950ies
was it shown that under certain conditions
viruses could cause leukemias and other
tumours also in other animals, e.g. mice.
Studies of virus-induced changes of the
growth characteristics of a normal cell
to that of tumour cells - a phenomenon
referred to as transformation - was facilitated
during this decade due to the availability
of methods for cultivating cells under
laboratory conditions. This technique combined
with the discovery of several viruses which
could cause transformation in animals and
in cell cultures provided facilities for
studies of the role of the virus in this
process. It was found that both viruses
which contain genetic material of the same
type as that present in chromosomes of
cells i.e. deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
and also viruses containing a different
type of genetic material, ribonucleic acid
(RNA) could cause transformation.”
Sources: Wikipedia, Nobelprize.org, Nobel
Prize Autobiography |