Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-59
smart—that he should look to basic research and not to clinical research. He had originally
avoided the Cambridge/Harvard area.
LIPPINCOTT: Why
BALTIMORE: Because he was afraid he’d be overshadowed. One of the reasons he’d gone to
Duke was that he saw Duke as a sort of out-of-the-way place—it was more so then than it is
now—where he could have a bigger profile. And in fact he had come through Cambridge when
he was first trying to site his institute, and I had actually presented to him—because there was
supposed to be a Harvard-MIT thing—but he said, “No, I don’t want to be up in Cambridge.” So
he changed his mind; he was now willing to talk about Cambridge. He had refocused his
institute away from medicine to basic research, and he’d also learned that in the academic world
a donor cannot control what goes on, much as he wanted to. So that was the whole background
to my meeting with him. I didn’t know they were thinking of me to direct this.
LIPPINCOTT: But you must have been a very attractive prospect to him.
BALTIMORE: I was attractive to him in a couple of ways. But one important thing—which he
told me later—was that he had asked a lot of people this question: “How do you form such an
institute; what do you do” And everybody had told him about their own work and how they
would use their own work as a basis for the project. And I, contrary to that, had thought about
the problem and decided what I considered to be the direction of contemporary research that
would be the best basis for building an institution—which was developmental biology, which I
didn’t do. Well, I did it, but I was not a core developmental biologist.
LIPPINCOTT: Do you mean embryology
BALTIMORE: Well, embryology, the development of the embryo, the signaling that goes on.
This was a big problem in biology—how do the egg and the sperm generate an organism
Everything in biology was relevant to it. Intracellular signaling in cancer was a developmental
problem—whatever you wanted. It was a good rubric for an institution, because it wasn’t
particularly restricted, and yet it was recognizable as a direction of science that was strong and