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

David Baltimore shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine when he was thirty-seven, for work that he and, independently, the late Howard Temin did to discover and explain reverse transcriptase—the enzyme that allows RNA to make DNA. It was a discovery of remarkable significance. Baltimore was the founding director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT, which has become one of the best in the world. He was president of Rockefeller University, and is currently president of the California Institute of Technology. He is a virologist par excellence, well known as a mentor of outstanding young scientists, and a man of conscience who has been a statesman and policy leader for the biomedical research community worldwide. He understands principle, and he has learned to understand the need for compromise in the best sense in the policy arena.

However, like many who have reached the pinnacles of science, his professional life has had its ups and downs. When a junior female colleague and co-author at MIT was accused of scientific fraud related to data published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Baltimore defended her and, by implication, himself against relentless attack from Congress, the press, and jealous scienists who would bring him down. While he thought he was defending the independence of research and the capacity of science to correct its errors, his detractors accused him of arrogance. Eventually, the brouhaha became the excuse to oust him from the Rockefeller presidency, where he was making waves by trying to establish greater prominence for younger researchers in a university traditionally ruled by seniority. In short, David Baltimore is both a significant scientist and statesman. But he is not a saint.

Shane Crotty's biography of Baltimore does not exactly confer sainthood, but it comes close. Crotty, a Howard Hughes Doctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, has thoroughly researched Baltimore's life through the writings of others as well as through interviews with numerous colleagues. It is an admirable job. In fact, it may be fair to say that there is nothing wrong with Crotty's book. The facts are accurate and the picture he paints is complete—especially given the fact that the majority of his sources are on Baltimore's side. But he goes a bit far in attributing to Baltimore both a life story and personal characteristics that could equally well describe any number of stellar biomedical researchers who are that complex mix of intellectual brilliance, self-confidence writ large, a genuine desire to help humanity, and a touch of bravado. In the opening chapter on Baltimore's early life in Great Neck, Long Island, Crotty paints a picture of a young man born to supportive Jewish parents who pushed him to excel; while admirable, this is hardly exceptional. Likewise, Crotty's descriptions of Baltimore's life as a college student fail to identify the "je ne sais quoi" that distinguishes him from dozens of his peers. Perhaps the point is simply that he had a good family and excellent academic opportunities, and that it is not necessary to search this realm of his life for the qualities that made him excel so notably as adult.

Much the same could be said or inferred about Crotty's descriptions of Baltimore's life in science. Because it is all gleaned from interviews held long after the fact, and because Crotty is a talented but yet-inexperienced historian or biographer, his book is simultaneously factual, occasionally perceptive, but generally flat. Nonetheless, his research and writing show real promise. He has produced a biography that is solid; he can be proud of it. Readers should wait with interest for his next volume.