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 ...
