Former Caltech President David Baltimore Dead at 87

David Baltimore, the former president of California Institute in Technology in Pasadena who won a Nobel Prize at the age of 37, has died at 87, officials confirmed Sunday.

Baltimore died Saturday at his home in Massachusetts. The cause of death was not immediately available.

He led the Caltech campus from 1997-2006, and was also a biology professor at the school.

“David Baltimore’s contributions as a virologist, discerning fundamental mechanisms and applying those insights to immunology, to cancer, to AIDS, have transformed biology and medicine,” Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum said in a statement provided to City News Service.

“David’s profound influence as a mentor to generations of students and postdocs, his generosity as a colleague, his leadership of great scientific institutions, and his deep involvement in international efforts to define ethical boundaries for biological advances, fill out an extraordinary intellectual life,” he added.

Baltimore’s research in gene therapy led to breakthroughs in cancer research, including insights into chronic myelogenous leukemia, a rare type of bone marrow cancer, according to the OC Register.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975, and the Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science in 2021.