Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-54
LIPPINCOTT: OK. Renato Dulbecco was given the prize for some slightly different work—not
in reverse transcriptase.
BALTIMORE: His work was on DNA viruses. He showed the integration of DNA viruses into
the cell. So it was the same sort of issue, the permanent change in the cell induced by a cancerinducing
virus.
LIPPINCOTT: Everybody who gets the Nobel says their life changes immeasurably. Did yours,
because of the award
BALTIMORE: Well, lots of things changed. First of all, the pressures on your time change;
suddenly, everybody wants you to be everywhere, and that hasn’t stopped to this day. I turn
down, easily once a week, an invitation to an international symposium or something like that.
LIPPINCOTT: You were just getting into immunology at that point at MIT. Was this interfering
with your research
BALTIMORE: It did. I had taken a sabbatical in ’75 and gone to New York to spend a year at the
Rockefeller University, in Jim Darnell’s lab. I heard about the prize when I was in New York.
LIPPINCOTT: I was going to ask you, did they call you up in the middle of the night How did
that work
BALTIMORE: I didn’t know it was going to be announced; I had no idea that the prize would be
announced; I just didn’t pay any attention to it; it just didn’t seem relevant to me. But Alice, my
wife, was in Copenhagen at a leukemia meeting. We had a very young child at that point, so I
was home with the child, and she was—we had a nanny, also—so Alice was off at the meeting.
She was in a symposium that morning in Copenhagen, and the chair of the session was George
Klein, who was at that point the central figure in cancer research in Sweden and a member of the
committee that awarded the Nobel; and he knew that it was going to be announced at what I
believe was twelve o’clock, or twelve-thirty, their time. He was chairing the session that Alice
was in. George was famous—is famous to this day—for being able to summarize a session and