Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-28
BALTIMORE: No, I think he came from Illinois. He had been at Indiana and then Illinois, and
then came to MIT.
LIPPINCOTT: So you looked at Rockefeller and you looked at MIT. Anywhere else
BALTIMORE: I glanced at Harvard, but I just couldn’t see what was going on there.
LIPPINCOTT: Nothing. [Laughter]
BALTIMORE: Well, no, they had some—
LIPPINCOTT: They had Watson there by that time, and I think Seymour Benzer was thinking of
going there, but didn’t.
BALTIMORE: Seymour thought about everything, at one point or another. Only when he found
Caltech did he realize what he wanted to do.
LIPPINCOTT: Did you think about Caltech at that point
BALTIMORE: I knew about Caltech—Howard [Temin] had gone there. I probably read as many
papers from Caltech as from any other school. The stuff that was being published by Max’s
group—[Robert] Edgar, [Charles] Steinberg, [Frank] Stahl—was the basis of the course that
Levinthal taught at MIT in genetics. But California was just inconceivable to me. I’d never
been to California. I’d never been off the East Coast. It was just words—it had no reality.
LIPPINCOTT: You were an Easterner then.
BALTIMORE: I was an Easterner; I just didn’t think about going to Caltech. So I went to MIT,
and at MIT I made—which I’m sure I’ve described at great length—a decision to work on
animal viruses.
LIPPINCOTT: And you worked in Cy Levinthal’s lab