David Baltimore (born March 7, 1938) is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He is a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he served as president from 1997 to 2006. He founded the Whitehead Institute and directed it from 1982 to 1990. In 2008, he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2008.
At age 37, Baltimore won the Nobel Prize with Renato Dulbecco and Howard M. Temin "for their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell", specifically the discovery of the enzyme reverse transcriptase. He has contributed to immunology, virology, cancer research, biotechnology, and recombinant DNA research. He has also trained many doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows, several of whom have gone on to notable and distinguished research careers. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he has received a number of awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1999 and the Lasker Award in 2021.
Early life and education
Baltimore was born on March 7, 1938, in New York City to Gertrude (Lipschitz) and Richard Baltimore. Raised in the Queens neighborhoods of Forest Hills and Rego Park, he moved with his family to suburban Great Neck, New York, while he was in second grade because his mother felt that the city schools were inadequate. His father had been raised as an Orthodox Jew and his mother was an atheist, and Baltimore observed Jewish holidays and would attend synagogue with his father through his Bar Mitzvah. He graduated from Great Neck North High School in 1956, and credits his interest in biology to a high-school summer spent at the Jackson Laboratory's Summer Student Program in Bar Harbor, Maine. It was at this program that he met Howard Temin, with whom he would later share the Nobel Prize.
Baltimore earned his bachelor's degree with high honors at Swarthmore College in 1960. He was introduced to molecular biology by George Streisinger, under whose mentorship he worked for a summer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as part of the inaugural cohort of the Undergraduate Research Program in 1959. There he also met two new MIT faculty, future Nobel Laureate Salvador Luria and Cyrus Levinthal, who were scouting for candidates for a new program of graduate education in molecular biology. They invited him to apply to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Baltimore's future promise was evident in his work as a graduate student when he entered MIT's graduate program in biology in 1960 with a brash and brilliant approach to learning science, completing his PhD thesis work in two years. His early interest in phage genetics quickly yielded to a passion for animal viruses. He took the Cold Spring Harbor course on animal virology in 1961 and he moved to Richard Franklin's (got his doctoral degree from Rockefeller Institute) lab at the Rockefeller Institute at New York City, which was one of the few labs pioneering molecular research on animal virology. There he made fundamental discoveries on virus replication and its effect on cell metabolism, including the first description of an RNA replicase.
Career and research
After his PhD, Baltimore returned to MIT for postdoctoral research with James Darnell in 1963. He continued his work on virus replication using poliovirus and pursued training in enzymology with Jerard Hurwitz at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1964/1965.
Independent investigator
In February 1965, Baltimore was recruited by Renato Dulbecco to the newly established Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla as an independent research associate. There he investigated poliovirus RNA replication and began a long and storied career of mentoring other scientists' early careers including Marc Girard, and Michael Jacobson. They discovered the mechanism of proteolytic cleavage of viral polyprotein precursors, pointing to the importance of proteolytic processing in the synthesis of eukaryotic proteins. He also met his future wife, Alice Huang, who began working with Baltimore at Salk in 1967. He and Alice together carried out key experiments on defective interfering particles and viral pseudo types. During this work, he made a key discovery that polio produced its viral proteins as a single large polyprotein that was subsequently processed into individual functional peptides.