• It’s often said that if the 20th century was the century of physics, the 21st will be the century of biology. And for that to happen, one of the reasons will be my guest this week,Prof David Baltimore, professor at Caltech.

Hello.

• In fact professor emeritus such a young age. Nobel laureate in 1975. In fact the year you got your Nobel was the year I graduated in biology. I have done no biology since then, so I’ll be a student in this rather than an interviewer. So tell us, do you think you agree with this expectation that this is a century of biology? Or is this journalistic oversimplification?

Well, actually for me the last century was a century of biology, because I grew up in that. I did all my work in the 1900s. And it’s amazing to see what happened. So when I started in biology in the 1960s, there was no molecular biology. We just learned about the structure of DNA, working out the meaning of that, and everything has blossomed since then and we now understand all the genes in the human body. At least, we know what they are, we don’t necessarily understand them . . .

• You don’t always know the Whys. You know the Whats.

For instance, in cancer, in the 1960s, we had no idea what cancer was about. Today we know cancer’s due to genetic mutations, we know a lot of those mutations, we know a lot of how that happens, and we are curing some, and we are not curing a lot of others.

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