The molecular biologist winner of the Nobel Prize and former president of Caltech, David Baltimore, found himself at the center of controversial allegations of fraud against a co -author – died at 87 complications of cancer. He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology for his work by upsetting the consensus of the cellular information only flowed in one direction. Baltimore is survived by his 57-year-old wife, biologist Alice Huang, as well as a girl and granddaughter.
“David Baltimore’s contributions as a virologist, discerning fundamental mechanisms and applying these ideas to immunology, cancer, AIDS, have transformed biology and medicine,” said Caltech Thomas F. Rosenbaum in a statement. “David’s deep influence as a mentor of students of students and post-doctoral students, his generosity as a colleague, his management of large scientific institutions and his deep involvement in international efforts to define the ethical limits of biological progress is an extraordinary intellectual life.”
Baltimore was born in New York in 1938. His father worked in the clothing industry, and his mother later became a psychologist at the new school and in Sarah Lawrence. The young David was academically early and decided that he wanted to be a scientist after spending a summer summer in secondary school to learn mouse genetics at the Maine Jackson Laboratory. He graduated from Swarthmore College and obtained his doctorate in biology from Rockefeller University in 1964 with a thesis on the study of viruses in animal cells. He joined the Salk Institute of San Diego, married Huang and moved to MIT in 1982, founding the Whitehead Institute.
Baltimore initially studied viruses such as polio and mengovirus which reproduce RNA copies of RNA gnomes, but then turned its attention to retroviruses, which have enzymes that make DNA copies of viral RNA. He made a major breakthrough when he proved the existence of this viral enzyme, now known as the reverse transcriptase. Previously, scientists had thought that the flow of information was going from DNA to RNA to the synthesis of proteins. Baltimore has shown that the process could be reversed, ultimately allowing researchers to use disabled retroviruses to insert genes into human DNA to correct genetic diseases.
