Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-79
BALTIMORE: A very nice day. It was actually blessed that it was a nice day, because that was
the El Niño winter, and we had had rain before, and we had rain after, but that one day was
gorgeous.
LIPPINCOTT: Well, there you go.
BALTIMORE: An omen, right.
LIPPINCOTT: Do you remember the commencement—maybe you weren’t here. They used to
sing the Hallelujah Chorus, and when they got to “And he shall reign for ever and ever,” it
started raining. [Laughter] Wonderful! OK. Maxine Singer spoke at your inauguration; she’s a
friend of yours.
BALTIMORE: She’s a friend of mine.
LIPPINCOTT: Were you the one who asked her to speak
BALTIMORE: Yes—whether I asked her directly or somebody else literally asked her I don’t
remember, but it was my choice.
LIPPINCOTT: She was at the Carnegie Institution at the time
BALTIMORE: She was at the Carnegie Institution. She knew me from when I was an
undergraduate at Swarthmore. She had gone to Swarthmore and came back for a visit—she’s
significantly older than I am—but came back for a visit during the time I was an undergraduate
and remembered me from there. And then I had seen her on and off; she’d been very much
involved in the Asilomar conference.
LIPPINCOTT: Right. It was a good talk, I remember.
BALTIMORE: It was a great talk—a lot of it was about [George Ellery] Hale. I was already
feeling that this was Hale’s university—although everybody calls it Millikan’s university, and