Raised in the Queens neighborhoods of Forest Hills and Rego Park, he moved with his family to suburban Great Neck, New York, while he was in second grade because his mother felt that the city schools were inadequate.

[8] He was introduced to molecular biology by George Streisinger, under whose mentorship he worked for a summer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as part of the inaugural cohort of the Undergraduate Research Program in 1959.

[8][4][7] There he also met two new MIT faculty, future Nobel Laureate Salvador Luria and Cyrus Levinthal, who were scouting for candidates for a new program of graduate education in molecular biology.

[11] In February 1965, Baltimore was recruited by Renato Dulbecco to the newly established Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla as an independent research associate.

During this work, he made a key discovery that polio produced its viral proteins as a single large polyprotein that was subsequently processed into individual functional peptides.

[21] This overturned the simplified version of the central dogma of molecular biology that stated that genetic information flows unidirectionally from DNA to RNA to proteins.

[17][21] The discovery of reverse transcriptase, made contemporaneously with Howard Temin, who had proposed the provirus hypothesis, showed that genetic information could traffic bidirectionally between DNA and RNA.

[4] Baltimore was well aware of the importance of the changes occurring in the laboratory: "The whole Asilomar process opened up to the world that modern biology had new powers that you had never conceived of before.

[27] The MIT CCR was led by Salvador E. Luria and quickly achieved pre-eminence with a group of faculty including Baltimore, Phillips Robbins, Herman Eisen, Philip Sharp, and Robert Weinberg, who all went on to illustrious research careers.

[15] After winning the Nobel Prize, Baltimore reorganized his laboratory, refocusing on immunology and virology, with immunoglobulin gene expression as a major area of interest.

[30] Baltimore persuaded Whitehead that MIT would be the ideal home for the new institute, convinced that it would be superior at hiring the best researchers in biology at the time, thus ensuring quality.

[7] Whitehead, Baltimore, and the rest of the planning team devised a unique structure of an independent research institute composed of "members" with a close relationship with the department of biology of MIT.

"[35] As early as 1984, Rudolf Grosschedl and David Weaver, postdoctoral fellows, in Baltimore's laboratory, were experimenting with the creation of transgenic mice as a model for the study of disease.

[8]: Addendum, May 2005 In 1990, as a student in David Baltimore's laboratory at MIT, George Q. Daley demonstrated that a fusion protein called bcr-abl is sufficient to stimulate cell growth and cause chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML).

[51] In 2003, as a postdoctoral fellow in David Baltimore's lab at Caltech, Matthew Porteus was the first to demonstrate precise gene editing in human cells using chimeric nucleases.

[52] In October 2005, Baltimore resigned the office of the president of Caltech, saying, "This is not a decision that I have made easily, but I am convinced that the interests of the Institute will be best served by a presidential transition at this particular time in its history...".

[55] Baltimore was appointed President Emeritus and the Robert Andrews Milikan Professor of Biology at Caltech and remains an active member of the institute's community.

[56] In recent research led by Jimmy Zhao, Baltimore's team has discovered a small RNA molecule called microRNA-146a (miR-146a) and bred a strain of mice that lacks miR146a.

"[11] In the span of his career, Baltimore has profoundly impacted national science policy debates, including the AIDS epidemic and recombinant DNA research.

In recent years Baltimore has joined with other scientists to call for a worldwide moratorium on use of a new genome-editing technique to alter inheritable human DNA.

[58] In 1986, he and Sheldon M. Wolff were invited by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine to coauthor an independent report: Confronting AIDS (1986), in which they called for a $1 billion research program for HIV/AIDS.

In addition to Calimmune and Immune Design, he also helped found s2A Molecular, Inc.[58] He has consulted at various companies including Collaborative Research, Bristol Myers Squibb, and most recently Virtualitics.

He has also been a member of numerous Scientific Advisory Boards, and currently serves with PACT Pharma, Volastra Therapeutics, Vir Biotechnology, and the Center for Infectious Diseases Research at Westlake University.

[70][80] Baltimore is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board[81] and an Xconomist (an editorial advisor for the tech news and media company, Xconomy).

[88] Representative John Dingell (D-MI) also aggressively pursued it, eventually calling in U.S. Secret Service (USSS; U.S. Treasury) document examiners.

[88] In a draft report dated March 14, 1991, based mainly on USSS forensics findings, NIH's fraud unit, then called the Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI), accused Imanishi-Kari of falsifying and fabricating data.

[93] Amid concerns raised by negative publicity in connection with the scandal, Baltimore resigned as president of Rockefeller University[94] and rejoined the MIT Biology faculty.

As their final report stated, the HHS panel "found that much of what ORI presented was irrelevant, had limited probative value, was internally inconsistent, lacked reliability or foundation, was not credible or not corroborated, or was based on unwarranted assumptions."

[100] The pair were reassigned to other positions at NIH because they failed to maintain productivity in their roles as scientists and questions were raised about the legitimacy of their self-appointed inquiries into scientific integrity.

A month later, Baltimore told the Los Angeles Times that he "should have softened the phrase 'smoking gun' because I don't believe that it proves the origin of the furin cleavage site but it does sound that way.