David Baltimore across the Internet

David Baltimore is quite an accomplished scientist: 1975 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine (but which one, dammit!), basically for the discovery of the reverse transcriptase enzyme; president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; president of CalTech in Pasadena; and the list of honors goes on. Well, you have the Internet right there if you want to find out; I'm not going to catalog all his field day awards here. Anyway, being the virus scholar that I am, I was familiar with Baltimore's Nobel research, and his classification scheme for viruses based on their relationship to mRNA. More recently, I knew he was seriously involved in research to develop an HIV vaccine. This PBS Frontline interview dating from May 30, 2006 provides some excellent background, both on the man and the mission.

Lately, there has been a small explosion of Internet activity surrounding David Baltimore. First up, this piece from the Feb. 18th NY Times. During a special session at the AAAS annual meeting, Baltimore openly criticized the Bush administration's repressive tactics and exploitation of science to support its own policies.

"It's no accident that we are seeing such an extensive suppression of scientific freedom," he said. "It's part of the theory of government now, and it's a theory we need to vociferously oppose." Far from twisting science to suit its own goals, he said, the government should be "the guardian of intellectual freedom."

Huzzah! Now, if we could only have embraced that zeitgeist from the beginning of these eight years of hell. But I digress. On the Feb. 1 installment of NPR's Talk of the Nation, Baltimore was the guest, and weighed in with similar sentiments: restoring respect to scientists and restoring funding to important scientific endeavors. We really have fallen from grace, particularly if one were to compare the stature of today's scientists with those of the likes of Max Delbruck, John von Neumann, or Francis Crick. Of particular interest to me were the rarely heard (anymore) topics of space exploration and population control. Asimov would have been pleased that these were brought up - though severely disappointed at how little we've done in either sphere at this point. The program can be heard here and is about 25 minutes in duration.

Finally, Good news, everyone! Baltimore was also quoted as more-or-less acknowledging defeat in the quest for an HIV vaccine.

Prof Baltimore added: "Against that background, the vaccine community has tried its best. It initially made an attempt to control the virus through antibodies, but found that the virus was quite solidly protected against that mode of attack. It then switched to trying the other arm of immune protection, the cellular immune system. That has never been mobilised to protect against a virus because it was not through to be powerful enough. Sure enough, in full-scale clinical trial the first such candidate vaccine gave no protection.''

He said the scientific community was still doggedly trying for a cellular vaccine breakthrough, as well as persevering with antibodies. "But the community is depressed because we see no hopeful route to success,'' said Prof Baltimore. He added: "Some years ago I came to the conclusion that our community had to seriously undertake new approaches or we might find ourselves with a world-wide epidemic and no effective response. That is just where we are today.''

But not to worry: blast away that dejection with this spirited response from another science blogger I have only recently discovered - and someone who is likewise interested in viruses! So while this may be the end of the road for the particular approach headed up by Baltimore and colleagues, clearly we have yet to exhaust all our options. That, and the determined attitude of scientists like ERV, is truly good news.