49 Facts About David Baltimore

David Baltimore was born on March 7,1938 and is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine.

David Baltimore is President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, where he served as president from 1997 to 2006.

David Baltimore served as the director of the Joint Center for Translational Medicine, which joined Caltech and UCLA in a program to translate basic scientific discoveries into clinical realities.

David Baltimore formerly served as president of Rockefeller University from 1990 to 1991, founder and director of the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research from 1982 to 1990, and was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.

David Baltimore has trained many doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows, several of whom have gone on to notable and distinguished research careers.

David Baltimore sits on the Board of Sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and as a senior scientific advisor to the Science Philanthropy Alliance.

David Baltimore was born on March 7,1938, in New York City to Gertrude and Richard David Baltimore.

David Baltimore's father had been raised as an Orthodox Jew and his mother was an atheist, and Baltimore observed Jewish holidays and would attend synagogue with his father through his Bar Mitzvah.

David Baltimore graduated from Great Neck North High School in 1956, and credits his interest in biology to a high-school summer spent at the Jackson Laboratory's Summer Student Program in Bar Harbor, Maine.

David Baltimore earned his bachelor's degree with high honors at Swarthmore College in 1960.

David Baltimore was introduced to molecular biology by George Streisinger, under whose mentorship he worked for a summer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as part of the inaugural cohort of the Undergraduate Research Program in 1959.

David Baltimore took the Cold Spring Harbor course on animal virology in 1961 and he moved to Richard Franklin's lab at the Rockefeller Institute at New York City, which was one of the few labs pioneering molecular research on animal virology.

In February 1965, David Baltimore was recruited by Renato Dulbecco to the newly established Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla as an independent research associate.

David Baltimore met his future wife, Alice Huang, who began working with Baltimore at Salk in 1967.

David Baltimore extended this work and examined two RNA tumor viruses, Rauscher murine leukemia virus and Rous sarcoma virus.

In 1972, at the age of 34, David Baltimore was awarded tenure as a professor of biology at MIT, a post that he held until 1997.

David Baltimore helped Paul Berg and Maxine Singer to organize the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, held in February 1975.

David Baltimore was honored as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974.

David Baltimore returned to New York City in 1975, for a year-long sabbatical at Rockefeller University working with Jim Darnell.

David Baltimore tackled new problems such as the pathogenesis of Abelson murine leukemia virus, lymphocyte differentiation and related topic in immunology.

David Baltimore continued to pursue fundamental questions in RNA viruses and in 1981, Baltimore and Vincent Racaniello, a post-doctoral fellow in his laboratory, used recombinant DNA technology to generate a plasmid encoding the genome of poliovirus, an animal RNA virus.

In 1982, with a charitable donation by businessman and philanthropist Edwin C "Jack" Whitehead, Baltimore was asked to help establish a self-governed research institute dedicated to basic biomedical research.

David Baltimore persuaded Whitehead that MIT would be the ideal home for the new institute, convinced that it would be superior at hiring the best researchers in biology at the time, thus ensuring quality.

David Baltimore served as director of the WIBR and expanded the faculty and research areas into key areas of research including mouse and drosophila genetics.

David Baltimore served as the director of the Whitehead Institute until July 1,1990, when he was appointed the sixth president of Rockefeller University in New York City.

David Baltimore moved his research group to New York in stages and continued to make creative contributions to virology and cellular regulation.

David Baltimore began important reforms in fiscal and faculty management and promoted the status of junior faculty at the university.

David Baltimore was invited to return to MIT and rejoined the faculty as the Ivan R Cottrell Professor of Molecular Biology and Immunology.

On May 13,1997, David Baltimore was appointed president of the California Institute of Technology.

David Baltimore began serving in the office October 15,1997 and was inaugurated March 9,1998.

David Baltimore was appointed President Emeritus and the Robert Andrews Milikan Professor of Biology at Caltech and remains an active member of the institute's community.

In 2009 David Baltimore became director of the Joint Center for Translational Medicine, a shared initiative between Caltech and UCLA aimed at developing bench to bedside medicine.

In recent research led by Jimmy Zhao, David Baltimore's team has discovered a small RNA molecule called microRNA-146a and bred a strain of mice that lacks miR146a.

In recent years David Baltimore has joined with other scientists to call for a worldwide moratorium on use of a new genome-editing technique to alter inheritable human DNA.

An early spokesperson for federal funding for AIDS research, David Baltimore co-chaired the 1986 National Academy of Sciences committee on a National Strategy for AIDS.

David Baltimore holds nearly 100 different biotechnology patents in the US and Europe, and has been preeminent in American biotechnology since the 1970s.

David Baltimore is the principal scientific advisor for the Science Philanthropy Alliance.

David Baltimore's honors include the 1970 Gustave Stern Award in Virology, 1971 Eli Lilly and Co.

David Baltimore was elected to the National Academy of Sciences USA in1974; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1974; the NAS Institute of Medicine, 1974; the American Association of Immunologists, 1984; the American Philosophical Society, 1997.

David Baltimore was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1987; the French Academy of Sciences, 2000; and the American Association for Cancer Research.

David Baltimore is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 1978.

In 2006 David Baltimore was elected to a three-year term as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

David Baltimore is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board and an Xconomist.

David Baltimore serves on The Jackson Laboratory's board of trustees, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors, Amgen, Inc.

In 1986, while a professor of biology at MIT and director at Whitehead, David Baltimore co-authored a scientific paper on immunology with Thereza Imanishi-Kari as well as four others.

Around October 1989, when David Baltimore was appointed president of Rockefeller University, around a third of the faculty opposed his appointment because of concerns about his behaviour in the Imanishi-Kari case.

David Baltimore visited every laboratory, one by one, to hear those concerns directly from each group of researchers.

Amid concerns raised by negative publicity in connection with the scandal, David Baltimore resigned as president of Rockefeller University and rejoined the MIT Biology faculty.

David Baltimore has been both defended and criticized for his actions in this matter.