Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-26
BALTIMORE: I spent all of my time in the lab. I did a little project, and at the end of the
summer, George said—this was his form of publishing—he said, “I would like you to present
your work to [Jun-ichi] Tomizawa and [Alfred D.] Hershey.” These were the great men whom
George admired, who worked downstairs from me. Hershey later won the Nobel Prize [1969].
Tomizawa, who is not as well known, was a Japanese who worked a long time at NIH [National
Institutes of Health] afterwards. Anyway, we went downstairs, and I presented the work, and
they had a few questions, and they said, “That’s nice work.”
LIPPINCOTT: What was it on
BALTIMORE: It was on the requirement for protein synthesis for the replication of incoming
phage, I think; something like that. And I had some P 32 experiments, and I had done some
genetic experiments, and I had a convincing answer, which I’ve now forgotten. It was a
completed piece of work; it could have been published in its day; it was certainly on a topic that
people were interested in. But George didn’t care about that; all George cared about was, “What
does Hershey think of it”
LIPPINCOTT: You met Salvador Luria that summer
BALTIMORE: I met Luria; I met [Cyrus] Levinthal—everybody came through. I met Max
[Delbrück]; he came through.
LIPPINCOTT: Is that where you first met Delbrück
BALTIMORE: Yes. And Luria said to me that summer, “Come to MIT for graduate school.”
LIPPINCOTT: Yes, he had just formed a program in microbiology there.
BALTIMORE: He had just formed the program there. He was looking for students, he and
Levinthal. Luria was a microbiologist of course. Levinthal was a geneticist—later did a lot of
work in protein structure; that’s what he was famous for. Died young.