"Genes as Therapies "

(In collaboration with the Division of Biological Sciences and the Center for Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics)

8:00 PM Tuesday, April 07, 2015
Dennison Theatre

"MicroRNAs and Blood Cell Homeostasis "

3:40 PM Tuesday, April 07, 2015
Gallagher Business Building 123

Please join us for a seminar with David Baltimore, one of the world’s leading scientists and winner at age thirty-seven of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on virology. After earning his doctorate in 1964 at Rockefeller University, he did postdoctoral work at MIT, and later worked as a research associate at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, California, from 1965 to 1968. He joined the MIT faculty in 1968 and was appointed to a full professorship in 1972. After founding in 1982 MIT’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, he served as its director until 1990 and then became the president of Rockefeller University. From 1994 to 1997 he was the Ivan R. Cottrell Professor of Molecular Biology and Immunology and the American Cancer Society Research Professor at MIT. From 1997 to 2006 he served as the president of the California Institute of Technology. Since then he has been the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology there.

Upon being appointed to the presidency of Caltech, the chair of that institution’s board of trustees described David Baltimore as “perhaps the most influential living biologist and surely one of the most accomplished.” A colleague of his stated, “It is not an exaggeration to say that one could write a pretty decent history of the last twenty-five years in biology by reviewing Dr. Baltimore’s contributions.” He has been a leader in the effort to create an AIDS vaccine and in the creation of a national science policy consensus on recombinant DNA research. With other leading scientists, he helped to allay concerns about genetic research and also established research standards that are followed to this day. He has been a major figure in Washington as head of the National Institutes of Health AIDS Vaccine Research Committee and also as co-chair of the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine’s committee on a National Strategy for AIDS. He is the subject of an important biography, Ahead of the Curve: David Baltimore’s Life in Science by Shane Crotty (2003, University of California Press). Educator, researcher, administrator, he continues his vital work as a public advocate for science.

The seminar and lecture are free and open to the public.