Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-34
BALTIMORE: No, I’m not tired. I could talk about myself forever. [Laughter]
LIPPINCOTT: Oh, that’s wonderful!
BALTIMORE: I look at these kinds of things—which I’ve done in various venues, actually—as a
substitute for writing an autobiography. And this thing [points to recorder] seems to have an
infinite capacity, so—
LIPPINCOTT: Yes, it does. It’s not like the old tape machine, where you had to watch the tape.
Renato Dulbecco—did he bring you to Salk, and how did you know him
BALTIMORE: Well, I think he showed up at Cold Spring Harbor. He was a phage biologist
originally; he knew what I had been doing. When Richard Franklin and I published a whole
series of papers that really set the basis for biochemical analysis of RNA viruses, the world had
never heard of Baltimore and the world had never heard of Franklin. And we would get
inquiries: “Which one of you is the senior member of this team” Because Richard was a young
assistant professor and had never done this kind of work before. He didn’t do that kind of work;
I did it. But he was my coauthor on all of this, and that’s fine, and I give him all the credit in the
world for helping me be the success that I became. But people knew the papers of Baltimore and
Franklin—everybody did, in the animal virus field. So Renato certainly knew the work that I’d
done. So Renato shows up in New York to give a series of lectures, maybe at Rockefeller. I’m
at Albert Einstein, and he calls ahead and says, “I want to talk to you.” He was at Caltech at the
time, and he told me about the Salk Institute development—that this was going to be built, that
he was going there, and would I want to come and take a piece of his laboratory and start my
own independent work in his laboratory. He would arrange for me to get funding and a position.
It sounded like heaven. By this time, I was ready to think about going to California.
LIPPINCOTT: This was an entirely new enterprise, wasn’t it
BALTIMORE: It was an entirely new institution; it hadn’t been built yet. It was just being
formulated, and it was really Szilard who was the man behind it.