Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-11
BALTIMORE: That’s Elizabeth Russell, known to everybody as Tibby. She was fabulous; she
was sort of a mother figure to everybody and cared about people in a personal way. She was
terrific.
LIPPINCOTT: Did you know anything about what [James D.] Watson and [Francis] Crick had
done in ’53 at that point
BALTIMORE: Well, this was ’55. When I asked Jim Watson, here at Caltech when I interviewed
him [May 2003], what the response was to the discovery [of the structure of DNA] from the rest
of the scientific community, he had one word: “Silence.” The Watson and Crick discovery was
not appreciated for the landmark that it was for quite a number of years. So in ’55, when I was at
the Jackson Lab, you would have had to have been a committed DNA biochemist or something
to even be aware of what Watson and Crick had done.
LIPPINCOTT: Even after the little letter in Nature with the famous sentence in it 1
BALTIMORE: That’s right.
LIPPINCOTT: That’s amazing.
BALTIMORE: That’s right. I said, “Weren’t people calling you to give seminars and stuff” and
he said, “No.” The first person to really understand it was Max Delbrück, and Jim was asked to
come here as a postdoc by Delbrück and was on the faculty here [as a senior research fellow] for
a relatively short while, until he was called back to Harvard. He couldn’t find girls here, so he
was not happy. [Laughter] I’m quoting him. But Max understood it. And I think you can date
the change—that kind of hockey-stick moment—to the Meselson-Stahl experiment [1958]. The
Meselson-Stahl experiment was done here at Caltech by a research fellow and a postdoc: Matt
Meselson and Franklin Stahl.
LIPPINCOTT: Could you just summarize it a little
1 “Molecular structure of nucleic acids,” Nature 171: 4356, 737-8 (1953).