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

SEVEN: NOBEL GOLD

Seven N O B E L G O L D It's about time the scientists began to throw all their goddamned shit right out on the table so that we can discuss it. A L F R E D V E L L U C C I ,Ilaj or ofCambridge, .2la~iachusetti,I 977 IN THE FALL OF 1975, BALTIMORE was starting his year-long sabbatical at Rockefeller University, working with Jim Darnell. He needed a break from MIT, and he wanted to be near his parents in New York. His father had had his first heart attack that summer and was in and out of Mt. Sinai Hospital for months. Concerned, David, Alice, and their newborn daughter Lauren, whom they nicknamed "Teak," moved to New York.Alice was taking a sabbatical from Harvard to work at Rockefeller.They lived in the oncampus Rockefellerfaculty housing, at 1500 East 63rd Street, and they hired a nanny for Lauren. With administrative and teaching commitments aside, Baltimore's goal was to return to the laboratory bench, but those plans were soon curtailed. First, Baltimore and Darnell went on a two-week trip to the Soviet Union, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences. They met with a number of Russian scientists, and Baltimore recalls, "We talked an awful lot of nonscience, I can tell you-a lot about their lives." He was amazed to see the despotic conditions under which the scientists worked, and he also saw how a theoretically ideal social structure could go bad: It was very, very interesting. It was an eye-openingexperience for me. I never saw the Soviet Union the same way since. I grew up in a family that was quite left-wing, and quite sympatheticto socialist movementsalthough never to the Communists, per se. And I had, still have, many of those instincts myself. I understood then how wrong it could go, how bad it could be. I never thought politically the same way again. None of us did. . . . Countries like the Soviet Union that have tried to do just what I was talking about [at the Eli LillyAward Convocation in 19711,have failed because of a lack of public accountability.Accountability is what it all comes down to. . . . The notion that people will simplywork for the public interest and not their own private interests is wrong. They're going to take advantageof a situation in which they're not accountable , and work for their own private interests-as we've seen so grossly in the Soviet Union and generally in Eastern Europe. O n his way back from Russia, Baltimore passed Alice in New York's Kennedy Airport, on her way to a Leukemia Society conference in Copenhagen. Two days later, Baltimore flew to Boston to visit his brother Bob, then at Harvard Medical School. He had just become Uncle David to Bob's newborn son. But their father suffered another heart attack and was hospitalized at Mt. Sinai. David and Bob, along with Bob's wife and the baby, rushed back to New York to visit their father in the hospital. When David finally made it back to his apartment at Rockefeller for some much-needed sleep, he wasn't prepared for the phone call from Alice the following morning. O n October 16,Alice was in a conference session chaired by a member of the Nobel committee. The session ended at noon, Denmark time, and the chair began to give his discussion summary, a speech that normally lasts five to ten minutes. But he kept talking on and on, glancing frequently at his watch, clearly stalling. Finally, after apologizing profusely, he confessed that he wanted to make a very important announcement. Although it was too early in the day to be official, he told the group that David Baltimore, Renato Dulbecco, and Howard Temin had won the 1975 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. Alice rushed to the nearest phone in Copenhagen and called David. It was about 7:30A.M. in New York, and he woke groggily to the ringing of the telephone. Alice gave him a minute to wake up while she made small talk. Then she blurted out the news. Baltimore was stunned. He wasn't expecting the prize at all; at thirty-seven he was young to be winning the N O B E L G O L D 115 Nobel...