Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-101
BALTIMORE: One of the things that we focused on in this review was, How do you now take
what we’ve been doing in the laboratory and move it to humans
LIPPINCOTT: You’ve been doing it in mice
BALTIMORE: We’ve been doing work in mice entirely. Humanized mice—mice with a human
immune system. And so we are now setting about that plan, and that’s our focus.
LIPPINCOTT: Any particular diseases you’re—
BALTIMORE: Well, it’s HIV.
LIPPINCOTT: OK. Let’s see, we’re coming up to the end of your presidency. And it was maybe
a little bit blighted by this Luc Van Parijs guy—
BALTIMORE: Yes. You know, that’s been blown out of all proportion. It really had nothing to
do with anything. That was unfortunate. Luc was a postdoc with me here, did some very nice
work, much of which we’re building on. In fact, the whole engineering immunity program takes
off from stuff that he was central in starting. He was a very good scientist.
LIPPINCOTT: What happened He was tripped up after he left you, when he went back to MIT.
BALTIMORE: That’s right. In retrospect, he had been cutting some corners along the way—
either not paying attention or consciously—using figures more than once to make different
points.
LIPPINCOTT: In papers. This would be old graphs
BALTIMORE: Right. And they were slightly modified, but it was perfectly obvious it was
happening and had been happening for some time. It happened when he was in my lab, and it
happened before he was in my lab.
LIPPINCOTT: But you had no idea that—