Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-47
I did see, in early 1970, that there was a way to test this notion. I had to get some virus,
and I got the virus—that’s a long story, which I’ve told in another place—and then I did the
experiments. I’m proud to say I did them with my own hands.
LIPPINCOTT: And you found this enzyme.
BALTIMORE: And I found the enzyme, and the enzyme clearly copied RNA to DNA, and it
provided the piece of evidence that I knew would convince the scientific community that
Howard had been right all along. So when I had the experiments to the point where I was
absolutely convinced they were right, the first thing I did was to call Howard and tell him about
it. And he told me that he was doing the same experiments and had actually talked about them at
a meeting. So I said, “Well, look, we’re ready to submit this. Are you” And he said, “Well,
we’re almost there. We’ll get there right away.” And so we decided to submit them back-toback
to Nature. I had absolutely no qualms about that because I knew that Howard had spent a
decade toiling to make this clear, and that I never would have done the experiments had Howard
not developed the notions. Although that’s a little hard to know, because now we were ten years
later, and it was beginning to become clear to many people that this was not totally crazy. If you
look around that time, there’s some stuff in the literature that was much more positive about
Howard’s idea than had been true all through that decade. And after I did the experiments and
ran into some people in the scientific community, they told me that they were actually working
on the problem at the time. Like [J. Michael] Bishop and a guy name John Bader at NIH. It was
just the way I approached the problem and my own history in doing that kind of experiment—the
kind of experiment that was involved was something I’d been doing for ten years.
LIPPINCOTT: The enzyme was named by some journalist, wasn’t it Reverse transcriptase
BALTIMORE: That’s right. We called it the RNA-dependent DNA polymerase, being very
scientific about it. A mouthful! And the journalists at Nature renamed it “reverse transcriptase”
in their news column. I think it was John Maddox who did that, but I’m not sure.
LIPPINCOTT: Well, it’s a good name because that’s what it does.