David Baltimore
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David Baltimore (born March 7, 1938) is an American biologist and a winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Baltimore was born in New York City. A graduate of Swarthmore College (BA, 1960), he received his Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in 1964. At the age of 37, while on the MIT faculty, he received the Nobel Prize 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.
Also 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 (Caltech) in 1997.
External links
- Caltech President site (http://president.caltech.edu/)