Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-8
I remember a big thing was that I took some calculus when I was still in high school. Just a
little—but today, you know, you can take AP calculus.
LIPPINCOTT: Was that when you first became interested in science, and what kind of science
grabbed you, at the beginning
BALTIMORE: Well, I don’t know the answer to that. I’ve thought about that, and I’ve decided
that I simply don’t remember. [Laughter] I think the answer is “None.” What I knew was that I
was very good at it. I can remember one year in which I, just as a matter of protest, did all of the
homework for mathematics—for I don’t know, the year, or the semester, or something—in the
upper corner of the paper. You know, a lined piece of paper has a little blue line running down
it, so I did it all there. I simply wrote down all the answers, without having to do any
calculations. It all came very easily to me.
LIPPINCOTT: That’s mathematical. But—
BALTIMORE: That’s right, and the science, similarly, was not hard. Understanding chemistry;
and I think we had a biology course, but I don’t remember what was in it. But we certainly had
chemistry and physics. And because my mother was an academic psychologist, I took some
interest in psychology and had read a little bit of the stuff that she cared about—particularly,...
[Pause] Who was the great child psychologist at that time Someone whom she was actually an
exponent of and really sort of translated for people. Umm....
LIPPINCOTT: It will come to you.
BALTIMORE: Well, it may and it may not. Anyway, he was European, and he wrote in French.
You don’t hear about him anymore. At the time he was a pop figure, almost. He worked with
young children. [Jean Piaget] He had a whole series of theories about how they created their
view of the world. He was one of those names that everybody knows, like [Steven] Pinker. So I
read a little bit of what was around the house, and then my mother walked in one day when I was
a junior in high school and said, “You know, there’s this program that I’ve heard about”—it was