Christopher Michel · CC BY-SA 4.0

At 37, David Baltimore shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering reverse transcriptase, the enzyme that lets RNA viruses write their genetic material into a host cell's DNA — a finding that overturned the assumption that genetic information only flowed the other way, and became foundational to biotechnology. He went on to found the Whitehead Institute and served as president of Caltech from 1997 to 2006, before his death in 2025.