Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-63
and I co-chaired that. Shelly was at Tufts; he was a clinical infectious-disease guy, and I came
from basic science.
LIPPINCOTT: What did the NAS charge this committee with doing
BALTIMORE: Developing a national strategy to respond to the AIDS epidemic. To make a
judgment about how serious it was, give some sort of prognosis for what was going to happen in
the world, and what is it that we needed in order to minimize the devastation. And we wrote a
report. It was—may still be to this day—the best-selling report the National Academy’s ever
had. It was done as a joint NAS-IOM [Institute of Medicine] report. The IOM and NAS had
gotten together to sponsor this report and had used their own money for it, which gave us total
independence. We didn’t have to answer to anybody. Usually they get government support, but
they knew in this case that they didn’t want the government controlling the report. So we wrote
this report, called Confronting AIDS, which came out in ’86, and we called in there for a $1
billion research program. Now, $1 billion in those days was big money; nobody ever talked
billions. And it was my doing. One day in committee discussion— We met under a very tight
schedule. We had a great group of people; Howard Temin was one of them. And I came into
one of the latter committee meetings, and I said, “Look, we have to recommend a number for a
research program, and I’m going to suggest that that be $1 billion, because that’s a nice round
number.” There was no way to derive the number. You could say, you know, you needed $100
million for this, and $100 million for that, but fundamentally you might as well add it all up to $1
billion. And everybody agreed to that, so we called for $1 billion, and of course that was the
headline. We had a $1 billion research program on the books within about three years.
LIPPINCOTT: Was this federal money
BALTIMORE: This was federal money, yes. The federal government actually did respond to that.
So the report was widely read.
LIPPINCOTT: The work was spread over different institutions, I guess