David Baltimore (Nobel Prize 1975) discovered the NEMO gene in 1980. NEMO comes from the words Nuclear Factor Kappa B Essential Modifier. In part thanks to David Baltimore we found Andy’s diagnosis and we thank him for that.
Here’s what Harvard wrote about David Baltimore:
One of the world’s most distinguished and influential biologists, David Baltimore has been the president of California Institute of Technology since 1997. He shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1975 for pioneering research on viruses, which has contributed to the understanding of AIDS, cancer, and the basis of human immune responses to disease.
Baltimore
For almost 30 years, Baltimore was a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where his early research dealt with examining the ability of the poliovirus to infect cells. He served as founding director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT from 1982 to 1990. From 1990 until 1994, Baltimore was president and a professor at Rockefeller University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1964.
In the area of public policy, Baltimore played an important role in creating a consensus on national policy regarding the transfer of genetic material from one organism to another. He was an early advocate of federal AIDS research and co-chaired the 1986 National Academy of Sciences committee on a National Strategy for AIDS. From 1996 to 2002, he headed the National Institutes of Health AIDS Vaccine Research Committee. Presently, he is a member of the Independent Citizens’ Oversight Committee to the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which deals, among other things, with using stem cells to replace diseased tissues.
Baltimore was born in New York City in 1938, and received a B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1960 with high honors in chemistry. His numerous honors include the National Medal of Science, awarded in 1999, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, and the French Academy of Sciences. He holds 15 U.S. patents, and has published more than 600 scientific articles and two books.
More via Harvard Gazette here.
