Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-51
BALTIMORE: Absolutely. But there was a scare aspect to them. Well, we were scared! So that
scared the Cambridge City Council, and they found out that Harvard was going to start these
experiments and build a laboratory—a safe laboratory. This must be ’76 or ’77 [July 1976—
ed.]. I know I was called back from another Gordon conference in New Hampshire to come to
the City Council meeting in July or August. So the politicians in Cambridge decided that they
would make this an issue, and they drove Tom Maniatis, who was the scientist who wanted to
start this work, out of Harvard. He went to Cold Spring Harbor and then to Caltech. He was on
the Caltech faculty [1977-1981] until everything calmed down in Cambridge, and then he went
back to Harvard. I was with him yesterday; he just moved to Columbia.
LIPPINCOTT: Well, eventually they stepped down from this confrontational position, is that
right
BALTIMORE: No. What they did was to appoint a citizens’ committee. And let me tell you, this
was just citizens—I mean, the guy who delivered oil, and a nurse, and whatever—to advise them
on whether the NIH guidelines were a safe umbrella with which to go forward. And these people
did a magnificent job. They listened to everybody. They recognized who the kooks were. They
understood, as best they could but not badly, the nature of the issues, and they finally said, “The
NIH guidelines are the way to go.” With some modifications to give a little more local control.
But effectively they defused the problem; and at that point the politicians had no place else to go.
LIPPINCOTT: Well, that’s a very happy story!
BALTIMORE: It is a happy story. It’s a very important story, in that way.
LIPPINCOTT: Well, in the meantime, you had gone to Stockholm. I’d like you to recall some of
that. You and Howard Temin and Renato Dulbecco shared the prize for physiology or medicine
in 1975. What was it like in Stockholm Did your whole family come with you Not the baby,
I guess.
BALTIMORE: Well, my mother and father came. My father had a heart attack and was in the
hospital when the Nobel Prize was announced. It’s a funny story, because he was in a private