Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-32
LIPPINCOTT: So your PhD was from Rockefeller
BALTIMORE: My PhD [1964] was from Rockefeller. I worked two years at Rockefeller.
LIPPINCOTT: You finished your work in ’63, and you went back to MIT as a postdoc
BALTIMORE: That’s right—as a postdoc with Jim Darnell. And then after a year, he moved to
Albert Einstein. So I had to move somewhere, and I wanted to learn biochemistry. I knew
biochemistry, but I wanted more professional training in biochemistry, so I went to Jerry [Jerard]
Hurwitz’s lab at Albert Einstein. It was a little bit coincidental that Jim and I both went to
Einstein, although I did continue to collaborate with his lab a little bit there—but I mostly
worked in Jerry’s lab and got just terrific training in how to do biochemistry. Back when I made
this discovery of polio polymerase, the first thing I did was to show that the virus inhibited
cellular RNA synthesis and then developed its own RNA synthesis. The experiments on the
cellular RNA synthesis were the first biochemical experiments I did; I would publish them in
PNAS. So we went to write them up, and Richard [Franklin] had no experience writing this stuff
up, and I had no experience, of course, so Richard said, “Why don’t we go down and talk to
Jerry Hurwitz He’s the great biochemist”—he was then working at NYU—“and he will be able
to help us formulate this work in a professional way.” So we went to Jerry, and Jerry said, “Oh,
this is awful!” When we plumbed the depths of what was awful, it was not the work that was
awful, it was the way we had presented it. It was totally unprofessional.
LIPPINCOTT: You mean it wouldn’t have done as a paper
BALTIMORE: It would not have done as a paper, right. It was not in the right units. There was
nothing wrong with it; it just wouldn’t tell professionals the things they wanted to know.
Because we didn’t know what the professionals would want to know. But Jerry knew, because
he had been trained by [Arthur] Kornberg. So Jerry set us straight, and then we published the
paper. 3
3 Baltimore, D., & R. M. Franklin, “The effect of Mengovirus infection on the activity of the DNA-dependent RNA
polymerase of L-cells,” Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 48: 1383-90 (1962).