Nobel laureate was Caltech president

He played pivotal role in the debates over the use, and misuse, of genetic engineering.

- JOHN JOHNSON

WORKING SCIENTIST David Baltimore was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1975 for his discovery of reverse transcription, a process that helped explain how genes can modify cells.

In 2003, the Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore, then president of Caltech, paused to reflect on his role as one of the world's most decorated scientists.

"People keep emailing me to ask, 'What is the meaning of life?" "Baltimore told an interviewer, with amusement. "And they want me to email them back quickly with an answer!" Baltimore was then 65, an age when many people are retired from public life, yet he was still actively leading one of the world's top research universities. Others, he said, found their meaning "in friends, in dogs, in religion, in the self-reflectiveness of writing, etc. But Caltech people largely find it in the continual contest with nature." It was a contest that Baltimore waged right to the end of his life as a scientist, businessman and internationally respected conscience of the new world of biological engineering. He died Saturday at his home in Woods Hole, Mass., according to his wife, as reported by the New York Times. Baltimore was 87.

His death concludes one of the most illustrious careers in 20th century science. The bearded scientist with the penetrating blue eyes played a role, usually a leading one, in virtually every important national debate over the use and potential misuse of the science of genetic engineering, whether it was gene-splicing and the search for an AIDS vaccine, or the dangers of tinkering with the human genome.

But it was as a working scientist that he made his most enduring contributions, the role he was most proud of.

"When you are a scientist, and you are trying to prove or disprove a notion, you work at the bench doing the dullest, most routine things over and over and over again," Baltimore once explained. "I can't tell you how many ways things go wrong.