Ahead of the Curve: David Baltimore's Life in Science (review)

Ahead of the Curve: David Baltimore's Life in Science. By Shane Crotty. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2001. Pp. 270. $29.95.

An extraordinary group of scientists emerged shortly after World War II era, but especially after the ascent of Sputnik. Now in their sixties and early seventies, they dominated for decades virtually every aspect of biological sciences. They and their scientific progeny shaped the science of today. Standing as a giant among them is David Baltimore. To paraphrase his latest biographer, his accomplishments for the past 25 years underpin the fabric of modern biological sciences. To a large extent this is true: David Baltimore has the uncanny ability to ask the most significant questions and to find conclusive, unambiguous answers. Baltimore is also a forceful, clear, convincing speaker fully in command of his subject and his audience. Just how important were his early studies in virology and how well they were received is evident from the fact that at the age of 37 he shared the Nobel Prize with Howard Temin and Renato Dulbecco. His switch to viral oncology and especially to immunology led many of his contemporaries to believe that sooner or later he will receive a second Nobel Prize.

In science, fundamental discoveries end in a few, unattributed lines in a textbook. Few graduate students today would be able to identify the key scientific contributions of most of the personages cited in the book, or even to identify Baltimore and Temin as the discoverers of reverse transcriptase. Although the string of Baltimore's scientific accomplishments deserve exposition of Baltimore as a person, there are very few biographies of living outstanding scientists and even fewer outstanding biographers. Louis Pasteur's life was chronicled several times, by Vallery-Radot at the end of the 19th century, by René Dubos (1950), and, in the least flattering biography, by Gerald L. Geison (1995). Of outstanding biographies, that of Thomas Rivers written by Saul Benison (1967) is probably the closest to being the most thorough and objective. Many scientists have written autobiographies, not so much to declaim their contributions as to present their times and science as they saw them. The remarkable aspect of this book is that it is the third to chronicle some aspects of Baltimore's scientific life; most likely none of the biographies would have been written, at least now, were it not for the Imanishi-Kari affair.

In the late 1980s, several events focused national attention on a paper published in Cell by Thereza Imanishi-Kari with Baltimore as one of the co-authors (Weaver et al. 1986). A post-doctoral fellow in Imanishi-Kari's laboratory was unable to reproduce a specific assay and claimed that a key reagent was misrepresented. Later she called the work fraudulent. Another actor in the ensuing drama was Representative John Dingle. The national budget for scientific research was rapidly reaching a visible fraction of the U.S. budget. To non-scientists poorly versed in the mechanisms by which pure research translates into advances in health care, investigator-initiated research seemed a waste of resources. Add to this a spate of highly visible cases of fraudulent reports, and the Imanishi-Kari case seemed tailor-made for Dingle and his staff of inquisitors. Dingle, alleging widespread fraud, wanted undisguised government-mandated control over science. Baltimore decided to defend the thesis that science is best monitored by scientists.

There were two additional components in the ensuing drama. First, Imanishi-Kari's notebooks were, to put it mildly, a mess--a problem that significantly delayed the resolution of the case. The second, and perhaps more important component stems from the fact that the scientific community is a pyramid: being the first to make important discoveries brings memberships in academies of science or in exceptional cases Nobel Prizes. Being second brings no recognition. The popular sport is to subject those at the top of the...