Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-61
BALTIMORE: Well, so, now we have to negotiate. And it frightened people at most schools. It
frightened Stanford. It frightened Rockefeller. Harvard Medical School said, “Don’t worry. We
do this all the time.” All their hospitals are independent; Dana Farber’s independent. So I felt in
the back of my mind that the fall-back position was going to be Harvard Medical School. But I
loved MIT—still love it—and I really, if possible, wanted it sited at MIT, because I felt that the
quality controls that we could put in place at MIT would make it a success. But that would
require that all appointments be jointly Whitehead-MIT appointments. So we had to negotiate a
structure in which that could be true, but Jack was adamant about independence. So we had to
interpret “independence” in a way that kept Jack happy and MIT happy.
LIPPINCOTT: That must have been difficult.
BALTIMORE: It was. And then the press got wind of it, and they just— It was a terrible time;
that’s a whole story in itself. But I finally found a middle way and negotiated with both sides—
actually, with many sides—and put in place a structure.
LIPPINCOTT: And you agreed to be director.
BALTIMORE: And then I agreed to be director. This was 1982.
LIPPINCOTT: And up until 1990, when you became president of Rockefeller University, you
were the director. In the interim, I wanted to talk about the NAS [National Academy of
Sciences] committee on a national strategy for AIDS, which you co-chaired. This was in ’86.
How did you get involved in the AIDS epidemic
BALTIMORE: I got involved in the AIDS epidemic because I had discovered reverse
transcriptase, and the AIDS virus is a virus with reverse transcriptase and was actually
discovered by analyzing it for reverse-transcriptase activity. In ’82-’83, both in France and the
United States—
LIPPINCOTT: Yes, that’s [Robert] Gallo and [Luc] Montagnier.