Hear David Baltimore, PhD on Giants of Gene Therapy

Dr. David Baltimore needs very little introduction. He is President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Biology at Caltech and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975 at the age of 37 for “discoveries concerning the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell.” More specifically Dr. Baltimore discovered that RNA viruses can also be inserted into host cell DNA via an enzyme known as reverse transcriptase.

Throughout his career he has made significant contributions to many different fields including molecular biology, virology, cancer, immunology and of course gene therapy. He was founding director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, president of Rockefeller University, and President of Caltech. Among the many meetings he organized or co-organized are the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA that established the guidelines for how to deal with recombinant DNA, the 1986 National Academy of Sciences Committee on a National AIDS Strategy and he chaired the first and second international summit on human gene editing and we will hear more about that later.

In addition to all that he is an outstanding educator and administrator, and has made major contributions to science policy and in his spare-time enjoys fly fishing.

Baltimore discusses the Nobel Prize, searching for answers on an HIV vaccine, and how gene therapy could change the course of history during his one-on-one conversation with American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy President Hans-Peter Kiem, MD, PhD in the debut episode of ASGCT's podcast, Giants of Gene Therapy.

Alex Wendland, MSJ, is ASGCT's director of communications

David Baltimore photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Related Articles