Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-55
kind of pull out the interesting things. So he starts summarizing, and he goes on and on and on
and on. And Alice says she could not figure out why he was going on like that. And he finally
said, “Look, I want to make an announcement, but it’s premature. On the other hand, I’ve got
nothing more to say, so I’m just going to do it. [Laughter] And at, I guess, eleven-thirty, he
announces that the Nobel Prize is going to me and Howard and Renato.
LIPPINCOTT: And Alice was there on the dais with him
BALTIMORE: Yes. So Alice runs to the nearest phone to call me. Calls me, wakes me up at—it
was six-thirty in the morning, I think, in New York—and says, “First of all, nothing’s wrong.”
[Laughter] Because in those days you didn’t make international calls lightly; and we never
called back and forth unless there was something important, an emergency or whatever. She
said, “Nothing’s wrong.” And then she said—you’d have to ask her what she said; I don’t
remember at all—but she basically said, “Now, I don’t want this to spoil your life, but this is
going to be announced,” and so on, and we talked for a little while. I hung up. It was now five
or ten minutes to seven, and the prize was to be announced at seven. The nanny was up with
Teak, and I was lying in bed, and it suddenly occurred to me that there was nothing happening.
And I wondered, Could it possibly be that that was a dream [Laughter] So I went out and
asked Norah, the nanny, whether she had heard the phone ring, and Norah said yes, she had
heard the phone ring, so I knew the whole thing was real. And then about two minutes later, all
hell broke loose. Reporters started calling. It took a while for the Swedes to find out I was in
New York. Everybody has that problem; they’re somewhere else and the Swedes try to find
them. The New York Times, having discovered I was in New York, came over to interview me,
and the next morning in the New York Times there was the first picture that anybody can ever
remember of a baby on the front page of the Times. [Laughter] Because I picked up Teak and I
was holding her—although all you can see is the back of her head. That was the photo they
used.
LIPPINCOTT: Oh, that’s nice—for her, too.
BALTIMORE: When she graduated from college, a friend of hers, who had graduated a year
earlier and was working at the AP or something in New York, went into the archives and found