Background
David Baltimore was born on March 7, 1938, in New York, United States, to the family of Richard Baltimore and Gertrude Lipschitz.
2011
9500 Wilshire Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90212, United States
Dr. David Baltimore attends An Unforgettable Evening Benefiting EIF's Women's Cancer Research Fund at the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel on February 10, 2011, in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Duffy-Marie Arnoult/WireImage)
2008
2 East 61st Street At, 5th Ave, New York, NY 10065, United States
Anthony B. Envin and David Baltimore attend The Jackson Laboratory’s National Gala at Pierre Hotel on September 18, 2008, in New York City. (Photo by NICK HUNT / Patrick McMullan.com/Patrick McMullan)
2006
New York, United States
Dr. David M. Livingston and Dr. David Baltimore attend Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation 60th Anniversary Breakfast at Cipriani 42nd Street on June 13, 2006, in New York. (Photo by David X. Prutting/Patrick McMullan)
2008
2 East 61st Street At, 5th Ave, New York, NY 10065, United States
Anthony B. Envin and David Baltimore attend The Jackson Laboratory’s National Gala at Pierre Hotel on September 18, 2008, in New York City. (Photo by NICK HUNT / Patrick McMullan.com/Patrick McMullan)
2010
New York, United States
David Baltimore attends The VILCEK FOUNDATION Prizes 2010 at Mandarin Oriental on April 7, 2010, in New York City. (Photo by JONATHON ZIEGLER/Patrick McMullan)
1230 York Ave, New York, NY 10065, United States
Baltimore joined Dr. Richard Franklin at the Rockefeller Institute to do his thesis work. He obtained his doctorate in 1964.
1300 Morris Park Ave, The Bronx, NY 10461, United States
Baltimore studied for a while with Dr. Jerard Hurwitz at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to learn about enzymology.
500 College Ave, Swarthmore, PA 19081, United States
Baltimore earned his Bachelor's degree with high honors at Swarthmore College in 1960.
biologist scientist virologist
David Baltimore was born on March 7, 1938, in New York, United States, to the family of Richard Baltimore and Gertrude Lipschitz.
Baltimore graduated from Great Neck High School in 1956. While in high school he spent a summer at the Jackson Laboratory's Summer Student Program in Bar Harbor, Maine, which kindled the teenager's interest in biology.
He initially decided to major in biology in college but then switched to chemistry. He earned his Bachelor's degree with high honors at Swarthmore College in 1960. During his college days, he spent a summer at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories working with Dr. George Streisinger which inspired the young man to take up molecular biology.
He entered graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in biophysics but soon his interest shifted to animal virology. He proceeded to take the animal virus course at Cold Spring Harbor, taught by Dr. Richard Franklin and Dr. Edward Simon. He was highly influenced by Franklin who he joined at the Rockefeller Institute to do his thesis work. He obtained his doctorate in 1964.
He also studied for a while with Dr. Jerard Hurwitz at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to learn about enzymology.
In 1961, Baltimore left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and went to Rockefeller University to continue graduate work with Richard Franklin. Franklin taught a course on animal viruses that Baltimore had taken in Cold Spring Harbor. Franklin had experimental evidence that showed how certain viruses seem to shut down the synthesis of cellular RNA and induce synthesis of viral RNA.
As a post-doctorate, Baltimore continued to study viral systems, specifically viral RNA synthesis. In 1965, Baltimore became a research associate at the Salk Institute where he worked on poliovirus. He found that the RNA genome of poliovirus became the mRNA message once it entered the cytoplasm.
In 1968, he accepted the position of Associate Professor of Microbiology at the Department of Biology at MIT. One of his colleagues at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Alice S. Huang also moved to MIT and the two worked together on vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV).
Over the course of their work, Baltimore and Huang demonstrated that VSV, an RNA virus, reproduced itself by means of an unusual enzyme (an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase) that copies RNA by a process not involving DNA.
In 1975, Baltimore, Temin and Renato Dulbecco shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell.
Baltimore became a full professor of biology at MIT in 1972. From 1982 to 1990, Baltimore was a director, and one of the founders of MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. In 1990, he moved to New York to become president at one of his alma maters, Rockefeller University. After a year as president, he stayed at Rockefeller as a professor for three more years. Baltimore was president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 1998 to 2006 and President of the American Association for Advancement of Science in 2007. Baltimore is still a biology professor at Caltech.
David Baltimore's mother, Gertrude Lipschitz, was an atheist, while his father, Richard Baltimore, had been raised as an Orthodox Jew. David observed Jewish traditions like his father.
In 1968, Baltimore accepted a position as an associate professor of microbiology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By this time, he began to suspect that not all RNA viruses replicated in the same manner. Baltimore knew about Howard Temin's DNA provirus hypothesis that viral RNA was a template to make viral DNA, which then became the template for the synthesis of progeny viral RNA. In the '60s, this was a radical idea and a clear departure from the accepted Central Dogma of DNA to RNA to protein. Given his own suspicions, Baltimore thought Temin's theory was logical and was able to prove it by finding the RNA-dependent DNA polymerase, later named reverse transcriptase in RSV and in a mouse tumor virus.
Baltimore joined to call for a worldwide moratorium on the use of a new genome-editing technique to alter inheritable human DNA.
European Molecular Biology Organization
1983
National Academy of Sciences
1974
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1974
NAS Institute of Medicine
1974
American Association of Immunologists
1984
Royal Society
1987
French Academy of Sciences
2000
American Association for Cancer Research
Pontifical Academy of Sciences
1978
American Association for the Advancement of Science
In October 1968, David Baltimore married Alice Huang; they first met while working together at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. His wife is also a biologist specializing in microbiology and virology. The couple has one daughter.