News & Views item - February 2007

 

 

New AAAS President David Baltimore Has a Few Points to Make. (February 12, 2007)

    At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to be held in San Francisco February 15-19 this year David Baltimore will be installed as president.

 

Professor Baltimore shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1975 for his discovery of reverse transcriptase.

 

He told Science's Becky Ham, "Much of my life since the Prize has been taken up with doing science," but he's been involved in a few ancillary activities as well. He was a founder of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, president of Rockefeller University and the California Institute of Technology, and a leading figure in national policy commissions on recombinant DNA and AIDS research.

 

He told Ms Ham he wants to remind the public that "science is the driving force" of all modern life, not just his own and it's an idea Baltimore thinks has been lost in the classroom and Congress in recent years. "With science feeling itself under attack from various sides, it's never been a more important time for scientists to take a role in public life.

 

Professor Baltimore also made the key point that schools are one place where "increasing scepticism about rational thinking" has placed science under siege. In his AAAS candidacy statement, he said, "Raising children who do not know that life and our planet evolved over 4.5 billion years of change and development hamstrings them from participating in modern life."

 

He went on to say, "There is an opportunity for every scientist to be involved with a local school board," providing curriculum advice and helping teachers understand "the experimental nature of science."

 

And Baltimore has been outspoken about what he sees as government efforts to distort and suppress scientific research, "It's unique in my experience in science that the government has put shackles on a certain kind of research. We've never had a richer set of opportunities put in front of any scientists than the opportunities put in front of biologists today, yet there is a pervasive sense of being abandoned by the National Institutes of Health."

 

As the 2007 President of AAAS it would be surprising if outspoken not to say combative spokesman for science won't have plenty to say over the next twelve months.

 

NB: Some months back Time magazine interviewed a number of well known individuals from corporate high fliers to celebrities and even a Nobel Laureate/university president (David Baltimore) on their methods of "multitasking". Professor Baltimore's answer was concise and unambiguous -- "I don't multitask".