David Baltimore is an American
molecular biologist and
virologist who won the
Nobel Prize in 1975 for discovering that
retroviruses (a group of
viruses that uses
RNA to code their
genomes instead of
DNA) make the
enzyme reverse transcriptase, which is used to make
DNA copies of
RNA templates. This is useful to a
retrovirus, which is trying to
reproduce by taking over it's
host's cellular machinery. More important, this is very useful to
molecular biologists and
genetic engineers who want to work with
RNA molecules using
DNA-manipulating techniques.
Baltimore was born Match 7, 1938 in New York City. He got his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Swarthmore College and studied virology as a biophysics graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He transferred to Rockefeller University for his Ph.D., which he completed in 1964. He was Professor of Biology at MIT when he won his Nobel. His other honors include:
- the 1970 Gustave Stern Award in Virology
- the 1971 Eli Lilly and Co. Award in Microbiology and Immunology
- the 1999 National Medal of Science
- the 2000 Warren Alpert Foundation Prize
He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1974, and is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Microbiology.
He is currently the president of the California Institute of Technology. His lab there studies signal transduction, transcriptional regulation, cell cycle controls, and and DNA repair processes.