David Baltimore

David Baltimore won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of reverse transcriptase, a foundational finding that illuminated how RNA tumor viruses transform cells and paved the way for understanding ABL and BCR-ABL oncogenic mechanisms central to CML. His subsequent work on transcription factor NF-kB defined a major survival pathway exploited by hematologic malignancies. He pioneered studies of retroviral gene integration and cancer, and more recently has contributed to CAR-T cell engineering and CRISPR applications in oncology. He remains one of the most influential figures in 20th and 21st century cancer biology.