David Baltimore

Origins and early life

David Baltimore was born in New York on 7 March 1938, the son of Gertrude Lipschitz and of Richard Baltimore, who worked in the garment trade and was the only son of a poor Orthodox Jewish family from Lithuania. He grew up in Great Neck in a family that kept the Jewish holidays, though his mother was an atheist, and had his bar mitzvah at Temple Israel; as an adult he saw himself as a secular Jew rooted in that upbringing.

A high-school summer at the Jackson Laboratory, where he first met Howard Temin, turned him to biology, and he took a degree at Swarthmore in 1960 and a doctorate at Rockefeller University in 1964.

Work and career

After working at the Salk Institute with Renato Dulbecco, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968, the year he married the virologist Alice Huang. In 1970 he found in RNA tumour viruses an enzyme that copies RNA into DNA, reverse transcriptase, published in the same issue of Nature as Temin, who found it independently, overturning the belief that genetic information flows only from DNA to RNA.

Recognition

He co-organized the 1975 Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA, and that year, at 37, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Dulbecco and Temin “for their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell”. In immunology, his laboratory found the RAG proteins that rearrange antibody genes and the factor NF-κB, and showed that the cancer protein of the Abelson mouse leukaemia virus is a tyrosine kinase, which led to the drug Gleevec.

He was founding director of the Whitehead Institute from 1982 to 1990 and president of the California Institute of Technology from 1997 to 2006, and received the National Medal of Science in 1999. He died of cancer at his home in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on 6 September 2025, aged 87, survived by Alice Huang, his wife of 56 years, and their daughter.