Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-102
BALTIMORE: I had no idea what was going on. And what’s more, when you look at the details
of it, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t about important issues he was doing this. It was about
unimportant issues—a control here... [Pause] You know, saying it that way may actually
explain what was going on, which is that when he had to do things that were unimportant, he
would cut corners. When he did things that were important, he didn’t cut corners—as far as
anybody knows, and he’s not been accused of it. And what happened at MIT was that he started
cutting corners about things that were important.
LIPPINCOTT: And some of his colleagues noticed it.
BALTIMORE: People in the lab noticed it. He was claiming things that had never been done, and
they knew that they had never been done; and so they blew the whistle on him.
LIPPINCOTT: Well, that’s a terrible shame.
BALTIMORE: Yes, it is a terrible shame.
LIPPINCOTT: Tragic. What happened to him Is he out of science
BALTIMORE: He’s out of science—he’s been working in the investment area. As I say, he’s
very smart. But from my point of view, it was an unfortunate but hardly serious issue.
LIPPINCOTT: But you asked that his work be investigated after it came out in the news.
BALTIMORE: Oh, right, absolutely. I mean, I had to. It had nothing to do with the news. As
soon as I heard from MIT that they had strong reason to believe that he had— I was called by
somebody I knew there, and he told me—he couldn’t tell me the details of it, but he said there is
no question that he [Van Parijs] was faking data on a significant scale. So I wanted to know if
we had a problem, and I looked over the work we’d done here. But, interestingly, one of the
people who is still in my lab worked very closely with him, and she said, “I never saw anything
to suggest it—anything of this sort.” And she actually created a lot of the figures in the papers
that we published with his name.