R.I.P David Baltimore - Noble Laureate 1975

 R.I.P. Prof. David Baltimore

Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine (1975) — discoverer of the enzyme Reverse Transcriptase (RT) in 1970, at just 37 years old.

This enzyme has been in every high-school biology textbook, yet many of us forget how revolutionary its discovery was.

It changed the way we understand life, disease, and treatment.

At that time, the Central Dogma was simple:

DNA → RNA → Protein.

But RT overturned the dogma: RNA → DNA.

A paradigm shift.

Baltimore’s experiment explained how viruses could integrate their genetic material into the host DNA. Later, this became central to our understanding of HIV, cancer biology, and the development of therapies.

His discovery also sparked the golden era of viral oncogenes — genes like src and myc carried by viruses that could integrate into human DNA and trigger cancer.

I was fortunate to join a seminar earlier this year where Prof. Baltimore gave a keynote talk at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Cancer Genetics: History & Consequences)

That took us on a journey: from discovering RT, to viral oncogenes, to targeted therapy, to the human genome project, and finally, to the age of AI.

Science is like a staircase.

We climb higher by standing on the steps built by those before us.

We honor, respect, and cite their work — and that’s why science is beautiful.