David Baltimore

David Baltimore (born March 7, 1938) is an American biologist and one of the recipients of the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Baltimore was born in New York City. A graduate of Swarthmore College (BA, 1960), he received his Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in 1964. At the age of 37, while on the MIT faculty, he received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of reverse transcriptase, which transcribes RNA into DNA. This work upset what was until the early 1970s a widely held dogma: that DNA led to RNA, which in turn led solely to proteins. Reverse transcriptase is an important factor in the reproduction of retroviruses such as HIV.

Also while at MIT, Baltimore established the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He was an organizer of the Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA in 1975.

For most people outside of science, Baltimore is best known for his role in an affair of alleged scientific misconduct. In 1986, Baltimore had co-authored a scientific paper on immunology with Thereza Imanishi-Kari and others Margot O'Toole, a researcher in Imanishi-Kari's lab could not reproduce some of the experiments in the paper and accused Imanishi-Kari of fabricating the data. Baltimore initially refused to retract the paper although he did later [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WSN-4C592K1-10&_coverDate=05%2F17%2F1991&_alid=351527406&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_cdi=7051&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=d664a5eeb36ca8d9b24278c12fc875d3 (Imanishi-Kari did not sign the retraction). Since the research had been funded by the U.S. federal government through the National Institutes of Health, the matter was taken up by the United States Congress, where it was aggressively pursued by, among others, Representative John Dingell. Largely on the basis of these findings, NIH's fraud unit, then called the Office of Scientific Integrity, accused Dr. Imanishi-Kari in 1991 of falsifying data and recommended she be barred from receiving research grants for 10 years. Due to the ensuing controversy, in 1991 Baltimore was forced by his scientific peers to resign from the presidency of Rockefeller University, to which he had been appointed only one year earlier. An extensive file on the case, collected by the mathematician Serge Lang, was published in the journal Ethics and Behaviour in January 1993. In 1996, a newly-constituted HHS appeals panel, appointed by the federal government reviewed the case again and dismissed the charges of misconduct against Imanishi-Kari. Baltimore is admired by many in the scientific community for standing behind a junior faculty member at great personal and professional cost. The story of the case is described in Daniel Kevles book "The Baltimore Case" (ISBN 0-393-04103-4). To see a different slant to the story, see the book "The Great Betrayal : Fraud in Science" (2004 1st. Ed.) by Horace Freeland Judson.

Baltimore has profound influence on national policy in matters concerning recombinant DNA research and the AIDS epidemic. Baltimore was appointed president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 1997 to 2006. He is a member of the editorial board of Encyclopædia Britannica.

External links

Caltech President site
Initial report of ribonuclease-dependent DNA polymerase activity: "RNA-dependent DNA polymerase in virions of RNA tumour viruses" by D. Baltimore in Nature (1970) volume 226, pages 1209-1211.
Department of Health and Human Services ruling on Thereza Imanishi-Kari case (June 21, 1996).

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