Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-64
BALTIMORE: No, it was largely NIH, some CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].
There are twenty-three institutes in NIH. It was in three or four of those institutes. The major
program was in NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, but there were
programs in the Cancer Institute and other institutes.
LIPPINCOTT: Were they mostly devoted to looking for ways to make a vaccine
BALTIMORE: No. This was before we had drugs, so—
LIPPINCOTT: Oh, like AZT
BALTIMORE: Yes, that’s right. I don’t remember when AZT came. We needed to characterize
drug targets, we needed to make drugs. We needed to make a vaccine—vaccine was a central
issue. And we needed to find out more about the properties of the virus. We needed a research
program that was going to characterize every little nook and cranny of the virus, so we could find
out where it was vulnerable. And that’s what’s happened.
LIPPINCOTT: Do you want to talk about the prospects now for an AIDS vaccine, just a little bit
BALTIMORE: An AIDS vaccine is—I have always said, and I said it in ’86 and have said it
continually since then—that an AIDS vaccine is at least ten years away.
LIPPINCOTT: Sounds like what they say about fusion.
BALTIMORE: Exactly. It’s very similar to that, but that’s, like, twenty years away. Basically ten
years is as far as anybody can look, and that means that there is no vaccine on the horizon. But it
may not be ten years anymore, because we have made a little bit of progress. There was just a
trial which had, maybe, a positive signal in it. I mean, just on the borderline of positive, and
people will argue about it.
LIPPINCOTT: Is the difficulty that the virus is so mutable