Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

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Baltimore-21 LIPPINCOTT: Were you reading about bacteriophages then BALTIMORE: Yes, we were reading a lot about bacteriophage. We were reading a lot about cell biology. We were reading about everything. The great debates were going on about regulatory biology; the Jacob-Monod experiments were coming out then. There was a great naysayer, Sol Spiegelman, and I remember that I was unable to figure out whether to believe Spiegelman or to believe Jacob and Monod—because Spiegelman is actually a great writer and a very persuasive person and was given a lot of respect. He was in the review articles and so on. When I came to MIT as a first-year graduate student [1960], one of the first questions I asked one of the faculty was, “What am I supposed to believe” And [laughter] they said, absolutely off-hand, “Spiegelman’s nuts. Don’t listen to a thing he says.” Now, there was nobody at Swarthmore who could tell me that. That was actually a great lesson to me in the value of mentorship by people who know what they’re talking about. So, as I say, it was the halt leading the blind. And this group of us tried to educate each other; we all took the same seminars. Many of those people— Well, one of them is Jim Strauss’s [Bowles Professor of Biology, emeritus] wife, Ellen Strauss. LIPPINCOTT: Don’t know her. BALTIMORE: You see them at the opera all the time; they’re constantly there. They’ve seen Siegfried four times. [Laughter] And they travel around the world going to Ring cycles and stuff. Ellen was one of this group. She never had a faculty position; she married Jim and worked in his lab for her whole career and retired there. David Denhardt, who is a very important scientist; David Teller, who’s a faculty member at the University of Washington; a couple of others. So we had this little cadre of people, and that’s who I was quote-unquote teaching molecular biology to, because I had gone to Cold Spring Harbor that summer. That’s what I was going to tell you about. I was taking a microbiology course, and I said to the professor, who was this wonderful man who worked on diatoms—but he knew how to let us learn by ourselves— LIPPINCOTT: Was this Enders
Baltimore-22 BALTIMORE: No, this wasn’t Enders. This was another guy, whose name I can’t remember. No, Enders was positively opposed to our going into this stuff. LIPPINCOTT: Why BALTIMORE: “You can learn that stuff in graduate school,” he said. “You should study the parts of a frog.” He was really an impediment to what I wanted to do. I never took a course with him. And I got out of biology partly because of him, and graduated in chemistry because they let me do an experimental thesis my senior year; and the biologists wouldn’t. LIPPINCOTT: How interesting! The name of this other professor will come to you, and you can add it. BALTIMORE: I don’t know if it will or not. So, in the spring of my junior year, I’m taking this microbiology seminar; and I said to the professor, “Can we at least see what a bacteriophage plaque looks like Can we make a lawn of bacteria, and plate bacteriophage” He said, “I don’t have any bacteria. I don’t have any bacteriophage. But if you’ll bring some, we’ll do it.” LIPPINCOTT: A plaque—that’s a lot of dead bacteria that have been killed by the phage BALTIMORE: Right. But they’re beautiful, symmetric little plaques, and you use them to count the number of phages you have. That’s why phage was an object of such interest: because you could quantitate the number of these things by the number of plaques on a lawn of bacteria. LIPPINCOTT: And he didn’t have any BALTIMORE: He didn’t have any of the stuff. He knew that this was the thing to work on, but he didn’t care about it. LIPPINCOTT: There was no lab work connected with this seminar
Page 1 and 2: DAVID BALTIMORE (b. 1938) INTERVIEW
Page 3 and 4: CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Page 5 and 6: Baltimore-iii 51-55 1975 Nobel Priz
Page 7 and 8: Baltimore-2 BALTIMORE: The family w
Page 9 and 10: Baltimore-4 LIPPINCOTT: Oh! That wa
Page 11 and 12: Baltimore-6 BALTIMORE: Suburban, si
Page 13 and 14: Baltimore-8 I remember a big thing
Page 15 and 16: Baltimore-10 college at that point;
Page 17 and 18: Baltimore-12 BALTIMORE: Yes. That e
Page 19 and 20: Baltimore-14 BALTIMORE: No, I don
Page 21 and 22: Baltimore-16 BALTIMORE: I did not w
Page 23 and 24: Baltimore-18 BALTIMORE: Yes, that
Page 25: Baltimore-20 LIPPINCOTT: How big a
Page 29 and 30: Baltimore-24 BALTIMORE: That’s ri
Page 31 and 32: Baltimore-26 BALTIMORE: I spent all
Page 33 and 34: Baltimore-28 BALTIMORE: No, I think
Page 35 and 36: Baltimore-30 BALTIMORE: Polio and i
Page 37 and 38: Baltimore-32 LIPPINCOTT: So your Ph
Page 39 and 40: Baltimore-34 BALTIMORE: No, I’m n
Page 41 and 42: Baltimore-36 BALTIMORE: Oh, yes, I
Page 43 and 44: Baltimore-38 BALTIMORE: It was year
Page 45 and 46: Baltimore-40 LIPPINCOTT: No, it was
Page 47 and 48: Baltimore-42 DAVID BALTIMORE SESSIO
Page 49 and 50: Baltimore-44 BALTIMORE: The Cookery
Page 51 and 52: Baltimore-46 appears in Howard’s
Page 53 and 54: Baltimore-48 BALTIMORE: Yes, it’s
Page 55 and 56: Baltimore-50 The experiment I descr
Page 57 and 58: Baltimore-52 room and they didn’t
Page 59 and 60: Baltimore-54 LIPPINCOTT: OK. Renato
Page 61 and 62: Baltimore-56 all the pictures that
Page 63 and 64: Baltimore-58 and the profits from t
Page 65 and 66: Baltimore-60 contemporary. So that
Page 67 and 68: Baltimore-62 BALTIMORE: And that’
Page 69 and 70: Baltimore-64 BALTIMORE: No, it was
Page 71 and 72: Baltimore-66 understand that. Becau
Page 73 and 74: Baltimore-68 BALTIMORE: I still had
Page 75 and 76: Baltimore-70 LIPPINCOTT: Were they
Page 77 and 78:
Baltimore-72 BALTIMORE: This was—
Page 79 and 80:
Baltimore-74 LIPPINCOTT: You don’
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Baltimore-76 a biology school, in s
Page 83 and 84:
Baltimore-78 LIPPINCOTT: OK. So on
Page 85 and 86:
Baltimore-80 Judy’s book calls it
Page 87 and 88:
Baltimore-82 never came to pass for
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Baltimore-84 BALTIMORE: I don’t b
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Baltimore-86 BALTIMORE: Well, he wa
Page 93 and 94:
Baltimore-88 BALTIMORE: We intervie
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Baltimore-90 about this, but when I
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Baltimore-92 to announce it.” Gor
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Baltimore-94 BALTIMORE: I don’t r
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Baltimore-96 BALTIMORE: Yes. LIPPIN
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Baltimore-98 LIPPINCOTT: You mean h
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Baltimore-100 LIPPINCOTT: OK. In th
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Baltimore-102 BALTIMORE: I had no i
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Baltimore-104 BALTIMORE: So I was g
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Baltimore-106 BALTIMORE: Well, not
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Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

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