The Baltimore Case

David Baltimore won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1975 at the age of 37. Known as something of a wunderkind in the field of immunology, Baltimore rose quickly through the ranks of the scientific community to become the president of the distinguished Rockefeller University. Less than a year and a half after he went to Rockefeller, Baltimore fell from grace. Citing the personal toll of fighting a long battle over an allegedly fraudulent paper he had collaborated on in 1986 when at MIT, Baltimore resigned from the presidency. While never suspected of faking anything himself, he had stubbornly…