David Baltimore, Nobel Prize-winning scientist and former Caltech president, dies at 87

In 2003, the Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore, then president of Caltech, paused to reflect on his role as one of the world’s most decorated scientists.

“People keep e-mailing me to ask, ‘What is the meaning of life?’” Baltimore told an interviewer, with amusement. “And they want me to e-mail them back quickly with an answer!”

Baltimore was then 65, an age when many people are retired from public life, yet he was still actively leading one of the world’s top research universities. Others, he said, found their meaning “in friends, in dogs, in religion, in the self-reflectiveness of writing, etc. But Caltech people largely find it in the continual contest with nature.”

It was a contest that Baltimore waged right to the end of his life as a scientist, businessman and internationally resp