Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-14
BALTIMORE: No, I don’t remember the details or exactly how he fit into it. He was not a great
research scientist, I don’t think—at least not in cancer research. His name never turns up these
days.
LIPPINCOTT: What was Temin like
BALTIMORE: Oh, Howard was a very, very brilliant man—thought about everything, was aware
of everything, loved intellectual life. He was a tall—not terribly tall—thin man his whole life.
Constantly on edge; you just felt he was ready to explode at any moment.
LIPPINCOTT: Was he somebody you were particularly friendly with at the Jackson Lab
BALTIMORE: I wasn’t particularly friendly with him, in the sense that he was four years older
than I was. At that point, that was the difference between seventeen and twenty or so. He was
on his way out of college, so his confreres were the college students. We became friendlier
many, many years later.
LIPPINCOTT: Well, by this time had you decided where you wanted to go to college
BALTIMORE: No, I hadn’t. This was between my junior and senior years in high school, and so
that was the summer to begin to make that decision and to go visit in the fall and make
applications.
LIPPINCOTT: What turned you toward Swarthmore
BALTIMORE: I had already, I think, visited Swarthmore with my mother.
LIPPINCOTT: And she was interested because of the psychologists who were there
BALTIMORE: She wanted to take me around to various schools and look at things, and there
wasn’t a lot of pressure to go to Swarthmore. But because she knew some of the senior members
of the faculty there, she could give me an introduction. I remember meeting Hans Wallach at