Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-52
room and they didn’t turn on the phone in a private room until after, say, eight o’clock in the
morning. He got up early and he turned on the television set, and he learned about it from the
television, sometime between seven and eight—we got to him not long after. And they put him
back in Intensive Care [laughter] because they were worried about him. He was not well. He
never fully regained his energy, and at the time of the Nobel celebrations it was never clear to us
how much he remembered of it, but he was there. My mother was fine, she enjoyed it. My
brother came with his family. He had one child at that time, and she came; she was probably
four. But Teak was only one year old. We couldn’t take her—there was no purpose in taking
her.
LIPPINCOTT: No. [Laughter] She wouldn’t have remembered it. Did you meet many of the
other laureates there
BALTIMORE: Well, this was 1975, and the Nobel prizes started to be given in 1900, so this was
the seventy-fifth anniversary. And what they have been doing is that at auspicious times they
invite back all previous Nobel winners. So, yes, I met my fellow laureates as well as a very large
number of the then-living Nobel laureates.
LIPPINCOTT: Do you remember anybody who impressed you particularly
BALTIMORE: Well, there was a moment that I’ll never forget. As part of the ceremony, you give
a lecture to your professional colleagues. So physiology or medicine laureates give lectures to
the Karolinska Institute faculty, which is the great research institute of Stockholm. So I prepared
a lecture—it’s something you prepare very carefully—and sat in the front row and was called to
the dais, and turned around, and realized that all of my heroes in biology were lined up in the
row behind mine.
LIPPINCOTT: How marvelous! Like whom, for instance
BALTIMORE: Jacob, Monod, Watson, Crick—those are the main ones.