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

FIVE: MIT

M I T LANDING BACK ON THE EAST COAST was a relief to Baltimore. He felt he was there to stay. He and Alice went apartment hunting together in the snowy Cambridge neisghborhoods around Inman Square, Central Square, and Harvard Square. They picked a small flat on Soden Street, not too far from the MIT campus, and settled in together. Eight months later, they were married in a quiet ceremony inside the nearly invisible MIT chapel, with virtually no one in attendance. It was a private moment. A photo ofAssociate Professor Baltimore taken during his first fewweeks back in Cambridge showshim awash in the trappings of the 1960s. He wears a cream pinstriped jacket over a striped shirt that bounces off a kaleidoscopic tie. A single fat pen hangs in the lapel pocket. His hairline has receded , and his straight brown hair is draped over his ears. His beard has evolved into a dark mustache and a thick, pointed goatee. His eyes are as bright and striking as ever, though shaded by his boxy, black-framed glasses, popular among the serious thinkers of the era. His belt is clasped by a silver buckle adorned with a Santa Fe roadrunner etching Luria welcomed his prodigal son back to MIT, this time as a professor instead of a student, with a laboratory near Luria's in Building 16. For Baltimore , those early months as a new professor were a time to settle in and think about what direction his scientific work would take.After all, his thirtieth birthday was two months away, and only a fewyears earlier at Swarth- more he had predicted that his most creative work would be finished by now. In the intervening years he had obviously decided not to accept this landmark as the intellectual catastrophe he once feared. Nevertheless, the question "Where to now?" pestered him, as it always would. He loved working with poliovirus, but a single virus couldn't captivate him for long. He became anxious to diversify.As he looked for a new virus his thoughts wandered to VSV, an RNA virus related to rabies that causes a mouth-blistering disease in cattle. VSV was very different from poliovirus, and Baltimore expected it to present a whole new range of intellectual possibilities . "I thought it would be fun to work on something other than polio. . . .And I was very enamored with the vesicular stomatitis virus that [Alice] had worked with. So I said, why don't you teach me, and we'll have a joint program for a while, on your virus instead of my virus. . . . It grew very fast, so it was easy to do experiments; made high-titer [i.e., highconcentration ] virus stocks; it was very stable; and it had some interesting properties." One ofVSV's "interesting properties" would lead him to a problem important enough to win the Nobel Prize. As Baltimore began to explore the biochemistry ofVSV, the campus political environment intruded. Whereas Baltimore's antiwar activities at Salk had been distinctly separate from the institute, MIT was immersed in social unrest. The tension in America was almost unbearable. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis in April 1968.Turmoil rocked universities across the country as student disillusionment and angst led to wild attempts to overhaul the educational institutions. Like many other MIT professors, Baltimore joined a slew of political groups that protested everything from biological warfare agents to CIA agents. He belonged to the MIT chapter of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and participated in the New University Conference Group (NUC), one of many loosely organized, radical political organizations on campus. N U C produced a fourteen-page manifesto on radical campus unrest: We support the new student movement, for we believe it is the main hope for creating a movement for social change in America and within the universities. The society in which the student movement is growing is in need of radical change; it is in this context that we must understand the controversies now raging about the American University. The student movement includes . . .the struggle by humanist and radical white youth to end the complicity of the university with war and imperialism, with racism and domestic suppression of black and other minorities, with bureaucratic values and corporate interests. . . . We share with student activists the aim of constructing a grass-roots movement in this country that can have real effect in...