Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-48
BALTIMORE: Yes, it’s a good name.
LIPPINCOTT: So then you got to be a full professor at MIT, in 1972.
BALTIMORE: Once I did that experiment, and people looked at the response to it, it suddenly
became— I mean, papers began flowing from all sides that built on what we had done.
LIPPINCOTT: It was pretty fast to your Nobel. Only five years.
BALTIMORE: Yes, well, that’s why. And it was a lot faster to the realization that I would win a
Nobel—but nobody expected it to come that fast. Least of all me. [Laughter]
LIPPINCOTT: People began to talk about that, I guess.
BALTIMORE: Yes, people began to talk about it, so I was rapidly promoted to full professor and
made a member of the National Academy [of Sciences] and all of that, so that people weren’t
embarrassed by the Nobel Prize coming before they had done this.
LIPPINCOTT: I want to talk about that prize. But before that, in 1975, I’d like you to talk about
the Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA that you had a hand in organizing. Did that come
up because of all the brouhaha in Cambridge, Massachusetts
BALTIMORE: It’s linked to that, but it didn’t come up because of it. The Asilomar conference
came before that. In 1973, at a Gordon conference in New Hampshire, [Herbert] Boyer and
[Stanley] Cohen—I think it was Boyer—described their experiments linking two pieces of DNA
and showing that they would be replicated as a hybrid, as a chimera. And it was clear to
everybody at that meeting that a new era was opening in biology. But they also recognized that
there were some potentially dangerous things you could do with this new technology.
LIPPINCOTT: Dangerous, in that you didn’t know what the consequences would be