Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-77
BALTIMORE: No, it’s in the days of Delbrück, in phage genetics, where Delbrück had gathered
around him Steinberg, Stahl, Meselson—although Meselson was actually working with [Linus]
Pauling—and Bob Edgar and others, Bill Wood—it was an extraordinary group of people.
LIPPINCOTT: That kind of work was going on at Cold Spring Harbor, too.
BALTIMORE: It was, but Cold Spring Harbor wasn’t a university. And Cold Spring Harbor
actually played its largest role in the summer program, in training people. There were a couple
of very, very great core people there—Al Hershey, notably—but it wasn’t the same training
school that Caltech was.
LIPPINCOTT: Yes. Well, in 1996, I also want to mention the NIH’s AIDS vaccine research
committee, which you consented to chair while you were also contemplating the Caltech
presidency. Did you think you could do both of those things
BALTIMORE: Yes. The advisory committee for NIH was a few-times-a-year trip to Washington.
It was part of my continual traipsing back and forth across the country, which I did, and which I
continue to do, at a minimum, once a month.
LIPPINCOTT: Was it essentially just promoting research
BALTIMORE: No. We were a committee to advise the NIH vaccine program on vaccine
strategies, and we had people from around the country who together were probably the strongest
group of people thinking about the AIDS vaccine in the country. Now, we had our frustrations—
a major frustration being that we really couldn’t affect policy the way we would have liked to,
because they didn’t want to hear from us.
LIPPINCOTT: Who didn’t
BALTIMORE: The people who actually ran policy in Washington.