In molecular biology David Baltimore is a giant. September 1 marks the last day of his presidency at Caltech, and although he will continue to work as a professor, it is the end of an era in a long career that has been as controversial as it has been impressive. For more than a quarter of a century, Baltimore has balanced his long hours as a leading scientific administrator—founder of the seminal Whitehead Institute, president of Rockefeller University and later, for nine years, of Caltech—with groundbreaking work in cancer, immunology, and AIDS research.
Baltimore won the Nobel Prize in 1975 for his surprising discovery that RNA can be transformed into DNA, a process in cells known as reverse transcription. No one then could have predicted the role this discovery would play when a strange new illness began popping up in emergency rooms in 1981. The pathogen responsible, HIV, was found to reproduce using reverse transcriptase (thus it is a retrovirus), and Baltimore has been in the trenches of AIDS research ever since. The oft-quoted biologist has railed against the Bush administration's handling of science and is on the panel that decides how money will be spent on stem cell research in California, via the state's controversial Proposition 71.
But as great as his accomplishments are, Baltimore is perhaps best known for his involvement in one of science's most famous scandals, the so-called Baltimore affair. In 1986 Thereza Imanishi-Kari was accused of fraud when a postdoc questioned the results of published research that Imanishi-Kari had coauthored with Baltimore. The accusations were addressed by Congress, which concluded that data may have been falsified. An appeal to a federally appointed panel led to an exoneration, but Baltimore's vehement insistence that his colleague was innocent in the face of damning evidence led to his resignation as president of Rockefeller University.
Discover caught up with Baltimore on his final presidential vacation at his second home near Missoula, Montana, where his plans to fly-fish were interrupted by our questions about the future of AIDS prevention, the usefulness of stem cell research, and what really happened in the most famous fraud scandal prior to this year's South Korean stem cell debacle.
Why did you decide to step down as president?
