David Baltimore

Baltimore, David

(1938–  ) virologist, geneticist; born in New York City. He was a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1963–64) and Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1964–65), then moved to the Salk Institute of Biological Studies (1965–68), where he began investigations of RNA viruses. He returned to MIT (1968–90), where he discovered a tumor virus enzyme he termed "reverse transcriptase" which can transform the host cell's DNA into cancer-causing viral RNA (1970); for this he shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in physiology. In 1972 he synthesized part of the gene for hemoglobin; he then worked on developing synthetic vaccines. An outspoken advocate of self-policing of genetic engineering by scientists, he became president of Rockefeller University in 1990, but resigned in 1991 after an extensive controversy resulted from his attempt to impede an investigation of a paper he had sponsored (1986) by a former MIT postdoctoral researcher who had falsified her data.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

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.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.