This is an IHeart podcast.

I'm Maeve Higgins and this is Solvable, interviews with the world's most innovative thinkers who are working to solve the world's biggest problems.

Now, if this program were airing in the early 1980s, and I told you that the problem of how to treat those with HIV could be solved, you laugh in my face.

You might even call me a quack. Now, that would be mean because I would be a baby.

But remember, back then, HIV and AIDS were a terrifying epidemic. And one of the worst things

was that people didn't recognize anything familiar about this new communicable disease that was

laying waste to so many different groups around the world.

But discovering the secrets of HIV-AIDS and devising treatments for it did turn out to be solvable.

For this episode, Malcolm Gladwell spoke to a man whose work was crucial to making that possible. He's one of the most influential figures in 20th century science.

My name is David Baltimore.

I am a professor at the California Institute of Technology, known fondly as Caltech.

And I, early on in my career, figured out that viruses in their desire to grow floridly

have taken advantage of all sorts of molecular tricks.

And one of them was to copy RNA into DNA, which violated the central dogma of molecular biology, but set cancer research

in a new direction.

Now, he sounds pretty cool about it, but it was for this discovery that David Baltimore

was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, along with Renato Delbeco

and Howard Tremont. Now, remember that name. You'll Delbeco and Howard Tremaine.

Now, remember that name, you'll hear a lot about Howard Tumin.

The work they did independently of one another proved that what was known then as the central dogma

that genetic information carried in the building blocks of life, RNA and DNA, only traveled one way.

From DNA to RNA to protein, they found out that was wrong.

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