David Baltimore, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine in 1975, has died

American biologist David Baltimore died on September 6 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, at the age of 87, from cancer. He was awarded the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work "concerning the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell," jointly with Renato Dulbecco (1914-2012) and Howard Temin (1934-1994).

The Nobel Committee then welcomed the discovery of mechanisms that ran counter to a "dogma" of molecular biology, according to which genetic information is transcribed from DNA to RNA. By explaining how certain RNA viruses were able to produce DNA in order to multiply thanks to the cellular machinery of their host, David Baltimore and Howard Temin demonstrated the possibility of the opposite process: in 1970, they had independently discovered that an enzyme, reverse transcriptase, was the key to this mechanism. This type of molecule would prove to be involved in numerous cellular phenomena. With implications in virology, oncology and immunology, but also in genetic engineering, which are still relevant today.

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