David Baltimore

Baltimore, David 

Born Mar. 7, 1938, in New York. American virologist. Member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Baltimore studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Rockefeller Institute. He worked in the molecular biology department of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the years 1964–65 and at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in San Diego from 1965 to 1968. Since 1968 he has taught at MIT, where he became a professor of biology in 1972.

In 1970, simultaneously with H. Temin and independently of him, Baltimore extracted the enzyme known as RNA-dependent DNA-polymerase (revertase) from an oncogenic RNA-containing virus. He showed that the genetic information of the oncogenic RNA-containing virus undergoes reverse transcription with the aid of the enzyme. The resulting DNA-product is then included in the genome of the cell; as a result of this process, a normal cell becomes a cancer cell.

Baltimore shared the Nobel Prize in 1975 with R. Dulbecco and H. Temin.