Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-10
college at that point; he was four years older than I was. He’s dead now, of course; he died quite
young [1994]. He was sort of the guru of the high school program. If you had a question, you
went to Howard, and he always knew the answer. Howard knew everything. I mean, he was
famous at Swarthmore—he went to Swarthmore—for knowing everything.
LIPPINCOTT: How many other high school students were there that summer with you
BALTIMORE: It’s a program that runs every summer. There are twenty-five or so students.
LIPPINCOTT: And it was a couple of months that you were there
BALTIMORE: Yes, six or eight weeks.
LIPPINCOTT: What kind of work did you do there
BALTIMORE: It was a structured program. There were lectures, from the staff and from visiting
scientists, every day or two. And then there were three research projects that you did, with three
of the staff scientists or summer visitors. They were little projects; they dealt with some aspect
of genetics—coat-color mutants. You couldn’t really do much genetics, because a mouse takes
three months to breed, so you can’t get many generations in a summer.
LIPPINCOTT: But they taught you techniques, I guess.
BALTIMORE: They taught us techniques—the techniques were simple. For instance, I measured
lengths of bones from skeletons of mice, because the man I was working with was interested in
seeing whether there were genetic differences of some sort—I don’t remember exactly what he
cared about. I used calipers and measured bone lengths and looked up some statistics on it and
whatever. And I did something with the great Tibby Russell, who was one of the founders of the
genetics of the blood system.
LIPPINCOTT: That’s Elizabeth Russell