David Baltimore, Nobel Prize winner in medicine unjustly accused of fraud, has died

American biologist David Baltimore, winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Medicine, whose career was tarnished by an unfounded accusation of fraud, died on Saturday, September 6, at the age of 87, the New York Times announced on Monday, citing his wife and the Nobel Foundation .

Considered a major figure in molecular biology, the researcher won the Nobel Prize for his work on retroviruses and his discovery of a viral enzyme that helped us better understand the mode of action of HIV, which causes AIDS.

The career of David Baltimore, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was shattered, his reputation destroyed, and his work slowed in 1986 by allegations of scientific fraud. Although he himself was not charged, the biologist had taken up the cause of one of his Japanese-born colleagues, who was wrongly suspected of having falsified data from a scientific immunology experiment.

On several occasions in 1988 and 1989, he was heard, sometimes in stormy conditions, by a congressional committee. He was forced to resign in 1991 from the presidency of the Rockefeller University in New York, only eighteen months after being appointed. It was not until 1996 that Professor Baltimore and his colleague were finally cleared. "I will never be able to forget it," he confided to the New York Times , recalling this period.