Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-62
BALTIMORE: And that’s another story. The virus was discovered, and it was clearly a
retrovirus; but it was a new kind of retrovirus, nothing we’d ever seen before. So I was aware of
all that, and actually had even suggested to Gallo to look for it once, before he found it. So I
knew that world, and I knew about the controversies.
LIPPINCOTT: You weren’t doing any work on it
BALTIMORE: No, I wasn’t doing any work on it. My lab had moved largely into immunology
by that time.
LIPPINCOTT: Did you move over into the Whitehead Institute
BALTIMORE: Yes, I moved to Whitehead in ’84, when it opened. I had a poliovirus group still
and kept that through my whole career, but I had moved mostly to immunology. I also had a
cancer virus group that was working on the Abelson virus, and that actually fed into the
immunology, because Abelson virus transforms immune cells; so that was a core part of it. But I
was thinking mostly about immunology.
Walter Rosenblith was a Viennese who had come to the United States and worked in
communications, information theory, and things of that sort at MIT. He had risen to be provost
at MIT—was provost under [Jerome] Wiesner. Wiesner and Rosenblith built a lot of modern
MIT. And I remember that I was at some event, and Walter, who was foreign secretary of the
National Academy, came over to me and said, “The National Academy wants to start a
committee to think about the national response to the AIDS epidemic, and they would like you to
be co-chair.” This is 1985; it was when Reagan was president, and there was this homophobia
that penetrated the whole government and they didn’t want to hear about AIDS. There was just a
huge frustration in the scientific community because we knew this was a problem we could work
on—a problem we could solve, though it turned out to be harder than anybody imagined. We
wanted the government to institute a serious program of research, and many of us had been
outspoken about that and had been just totally frustrated by the administration, which didn’t want
to do it. So when Walter asked me to do this, I said, “It’s the last thing in the world I need!” On
the other hand, I’m sort of born into it; I can’t get away from it. So Shelly [Sheldon M.] Wolff