1938-
Biochemist

Education and Awards.

David Baltimore was born in New York City, graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.S. in chemistry in 1960, and received a Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in 1964. In 1968 he became an associate professor of microbiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 1970 he won the Gustav Stern Award in Virology. Three years later he was awarded a prestigious American Cancer Society professorship. "My life," he told a Time correspondent in 1979, "is dedicated to increasing knowledge."

Nobel Laureate.

In 1975 he shared the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology (along with Renato Dulbecco and Howard Termin) for the discovery of reverse transcriptase, an enzyme that carries out one of the basic processes in a cell. He discovered that viral RNA (ribonucleic acid) can pass information to DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and replicate. This ground breaking discovery explained the perplexing problem of the...