Ahead of the Curve: David Baltimore鈥檚 life in science by Shane Crotty,
University of California Press, $29.95, ISBN 0520225570
A PRECOCIOUS schoolboy, an undergraduate worried whether he would do great
work before reaching the mouldy age of 25, a confident鈥攕ome would say
overbearing鈥攜oung researcher: the David Baltimore who springs from these
pages not only has the intellectual gifts for success, but the passion and drive
too. Only 37 when he won a Nobel prize with Howard Temin for the discovery of
retroviruses, Baltimore鈥檚 life and work parallel the meteoric growth of
molecular biology in the past four decades.
Baltimore is now 63 and the president of Caltech. Tackling the fundamentally
impossible task of writing a biography of a living subject, Shane Crotty
deserves some credit for keeping away from pure adulation. Still, Ahead of
the Curve is essentially celebratory.
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You can see this even in one of the knottiest passages in the book, dealing
with Baltimore鈥檚 notorious and ugly wrangling with Representative John Dingell
over allegations of scientific fraud. Baltimore stood up for a co-author accused
of falsifying data. The case raised some hard questions about the conduct of
scientific research and the responsibilities of scientific collaborators, but
Baltimore only stumbles once or twice in Crotty鈥檚 account of the gruelling
investigation, and emerges triumphant on appeal.
When public fears flared up in the early days of recombinant DNA research,
Baltimore took on an important role of scientific leadership. It鈥檚 good to be
reminded how little anyone knew until quite recently of how viruses work, and
how genes command the manufacture of proteins. Crotty鈥檚 densely detailed
explanations of some of these matters will defeat many readers, but the personal
as well as scientific reasons for Baltimore鈥檚 eminence shine through.