Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-100
LIPPINCOTT: OK. In the meantime, in 2005 your lab got a huge $14 million grant from the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation. Your proposal was titled, “Engineering Immunity against HIV
and Other Dangerous Pathogens.” That’s what you’re doing now. How’s that going, then
BALTIMORE: That is going very well. We just had a review of that with a group of scientists
who came in two weeks ago, and they were very complimentary about our progress. And the
Gates Foundation—because we are coming to the end of that five years—is talking to us about
continuing the work.
LIPPINCOTT: Well, that’s good. I did want to talk to you about stem cell research and gene
therapy and so forth. There was an incident in 1999 where a young man [Jesse Gelsinger] died
at a gene therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania, because—I guess it was the vector, not
the gene—he was allergic to it. What was your involvement in the public reaction to that
BALTIMORE: I didn’t, in particular, have—
LIPPINCOTT: You didn’t stand up and defend gene therapy
BALTIMORE: Well, I had defended gene therapy. When I discovered the reverse transcriptase in
1970, I saw immediately that it enabled gene therapy.
LIPPINCOTT: And that there would have to be human trials
BALTIMORE: Oh, I didn’t know what the path to its becoming a therapy was going to be—the
regulatory path. But conceptually, it was clearly there, and I’d been following that ever since;
and much of our program in engineering immunity is basically a gene therapy program. So I’m
deeply involved in gene therapy—not using the kind of vectors that [Dr. James M.] Wilson used
in that Gelsinger situation, an adenovirus. We’re using a different kind of virus with its own
problems, but not that.
LIPPINCOTT: Is this the kind of thing that can be tested on human beings at this point