Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-67
LIPPINCOTT: What prompted you specifically, do you remember, to leave New York and go
back to MIT
BALTIMORE: Well, first of all, as I said, I loved MIT. I appreciated that the president of MIT
had called me, days after I resigned the presidency of Rockefeller, and said, “Look, I know that
you still have a position here.” I’d never resigned my position at MIT—and that was not a
conscious thing; it was sort of a convenience. First of all, many people, when they leave a
university, take a two-year terminal leave. It doesn’t cost the university anything, and it provides
you with a chance to rethink the decision if you need to. We just hired back here at Caltech,
within the last year, three major scientific figures, all of whom had left and were in their twoyear
period and decided to come back.
LIPPINCOTT: Who were they
BALTIMORE: Peter Bossaerts. He’s a professor of economics but a very scientific guy. He’d
gone to Lausanne. And Dianne Newman [professor of biology and geobiology] and her husband
Jonas Peters, who’s a chemist. Both of them had come here as assistant professors; they’d fallen
in love here and married and had a child, and they left to go to MIT, which is where Jonas had
gotten his PhD. They had terrific offers and they thought it was a good idea—and they didn’t
like it. And they came back.
LIPPINCOTT: Too cold. [Laughter]
BALTIMORE: No, not that. They just didn’t develop a comfortable social structure to their lives.
LIPPINCOTT: I guess Caltech was happy to see them again.
BALTIMORE: Caltech was very happy to see them again.
LIPPINCOTT: So you go back to MIT—