QnAs with David Baltimore
- Creators
- Nair, Prashant
Abstract
At the age of 37, David Baltimore accomplished what many researchers dream of but few achieve: reversing an entrenched dogma, eventually leading to a new view of life. In the early 1970s, Baltimore, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology, discovered reverse transcriptase—an enzyme found in some tumor viruses whose genetic code is written in the RNA alphabet. He found that reverse transcriptase can copy RNA into DNA, indicating that some viruses replicate via a DNA intermediate. The finding, which won Baltimore and others the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, enriched biologists' views on the direction of flow of genetic information in cells. Baltimore was the keynote speaker at the Sackler Colloquium, "Telomerase and Retrotransposons: Reverse Transcriptases That Shaped Genomes," held in September 2010. Here, he offers PNAS readers his perspectives on reverse transcription.
Additional Information
© 2011 National Academy of Sciences. The complete program and audio files of most presentations from this Sackler Colloquium are available on the NAS Web site at www.nasonline.org/telomerase_and_ retrotransposons, including David Baltimore's presentation. Papers arising from the Colloquium are published in the companion Sackler Special Feature, "Telomerase and Retrotransposons: Reverse Transcriptases That Shaped Genomes," which can be found in this issue of PNAS. Please refer to the introduction to the Special Feature on page 20304.Attached Files
Published - Nair2011p16752P_Natl_Acad_Sci_Usa.pdf
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC3251099
- Eprint ID
- 28776
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20120113-100846964
- Created
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2012-01-13Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field