Ahead of the Curve: David Baltimore’s life in science by Shane Crotty,
University of California Press, $29.95, ISBN 0520225570
A PRECOCIOUS schoolboy, an undergraduate worried whether he would do great
work before reaching the mouldy age of 25, a confident—some would say
overbearing—young researcher: the David Baltimore who springs from these
pages not only has the intellectual gifts for success, but the passion and drive
too. Only 37 when he won a Nobel prize with Howard Temin for the discovery of
retroviruses, Baltimore’s life and work parallel the meteoric growth of
molecular biology in the past four decades.…
