Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-105
BALTIMORE: Oh, don’t worry about them, they’re crazy. It’s a religious cult. [Pause] But no
reputable scientists would want to change genetic inheritance. And we’ve said we’re even happy
to accept a congressional ban on it, if Congress feels it has to do that. Because what it does is
enable us to do other things—other kinds of genetic manipulations that don’t involve the germ
line, and then the public can feel comforted, if they can, that we’re not going to start breeding
genetic monsters that breed true in any way.
LIPPINCOTT: I mentioned to you before that when you were interviewed by Charlie Rose in
2002, he asked you what subject you were most curious about, and you said, “Consciousness”—
the mind-body problem—which there hasn’t been a lot of work done at Caltech on.
BALTIMORE: Oh, well, Christof Koch [Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology
and professor of computation and neural systems]—
LIPPINCOTT: Except for Koch, yes. But that’s pretty much it, isn’t it
BALTIMORE: No, actually David Anderson [Benzer Professor of Biology] has worked with him
some and is trying to define how you would get some sort of a readout in rodents and mice so
that you could actually do experiments. And I think everybody in neuroscience is aware of the
problem and would love to contribute to it, if they found themselves able. And someday,
somebody’s going to be able. And it’s going to come out of the blue, in all likelihood. When
you say, “In 1945, the end of World War II, what were the great outstanding problems in
biology”—the great outstanding problems were how genes work and how development occurs.
Those are the two big issues in biology. Watson and Crick set us on the path to understanding
the first, and various people—Jacob and Monod, and a few others—set us on the path to
understanding development, which we’re still on. That one’s harder, because it’s much more
complex—the genetic problem is DNA. And the third problem you would have identified at that
time would have been consciousness. And consciousness remains as the outstanding problem on
which we have no demonstrable progress, because it involves understanding the highest levels of
brain function and we’re still working on the lower levels.
LIPPINCOTT: It’s how to get something abstract out of something physical.