Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-104
BALTIMORE: So I was going to spend more time in my lab, but I could continue to be president
until they had a new president, and I did that. It’s a very funny time. Because you have to
announce much of a year ahead of time, every president ends up with this one year of limbo.
LIPPINCOTT: You felt lame-duckish.
BALTIMORE: Lame-duckish, but since I had other things to do, it didn’t bother me. It’s not as
though I couldn’t find anything to do with my time.
LIPPINCOTT: Yes. You’re happy now in your lab, I guess.
BALTIMORE: I am.
LIPPINCOTT: OK. Just to wind up, I’d like you to comment on what you think the prospects are
for our participation in our own evolution. Do you have any ideas about that Given our
expertise in moving genes around and fooling with them.
BALTIMORE: We have put a pretty strong firewall in place around germ-line genetic
engineering—actually changing our inheritance. I think the scientific community is in
agreement that we don’t want to do that, that we don’t feel like we’re smart enough to do that.
LIPPINCOTT: I think they call it human enhancement therapy.
BALTIMORE: No, you’ve got to understand the difference between two things: germ-line
genetic manipulation and somatic genetic manipulation. Somatic genetic manipulation is about
you as an individual. We can change your genes in particular cells, in many cells, in a few cells,
and we can have a therapeutic outcome which could be beneficial to you. But you won’t pass
that on to your children, because it doesn’t change the germ line, it only changes somatic tissue.
So we make a distinction between those two, and really nobody has proposed even—except the
Raëlians, who are crazy people—
LIPPINCOTT: Who are Raëlians