Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-68
BALTIMORE: I still had an appointment; I also had kept a lab at MIT during my first year as
president of Rockefeller, just as a way of unraveling, because, you know, there were people who
didn’t want to come to New York, and it was easier for me to focus my attention when I was at
Rockefeller on Rockefeller, not on my lab. I kept contact with the lab by going back to MIT
occasionally and seeing the people in the lab, and I did a lot of phoning. So there was a reason to
keep people. I had never dropped it, so they didn’t have to reappoint me.
LIPPINCOTT: Did you teach, by the way, when you went back to MIT
BALTIMORE: I began to teach, yes, because I went back as a professor. So I started teaching,
and I hadn’t taught much for quite a number of years because I’d been involved in running
Whitehead.
LIPPINCOTT: So, in 1996 came the final vindication of Imanishi-Kari, and yourself. It coincides
with Caltech’s search for a new president. That’s going to be the meat of our interview; and I
wonder whether we should take another session to start that. I want to talk about Kip Thorne
[Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics and head of the faculty search committee] coming to
see you, but we’ll need some time for that, so this might be a good time to stop. [Recording
ends]