BALTIMORE, CITING FUROR, QUITS AS HEAD OF UNIVERSITY

Author: By Richard Saltus, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, December 3, 1991
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

Baltimore indicated in a statement that he had been unable to overcome the antagonism of some longtime Rockefeller faculty members who had strenuously opposed his appointment as president two years ago.

"I cannot lead The Rockefeller University as effectively as I would like," Baltimore said in a letter to the university trustees, adding that he will stay on as a professor. He said he plans to resume the AIDS research he
cut back when he left the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge and became president of Rockefeller in July 1990.

Baltimore became the first director of Whitehead when it was founded in 1981 but remained a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The resignation, effective on Dec. 31, was announced just weeks after a survey of senior faculty members found little support for Baltimore, said Norton Zinder, a molecular biologist at Rockefeller. Shortly thereafter, said Zinder, Rockefeller trustees called a meeting of senior faculty to explain their responses on the survey. Zinder said he did not know whether the trustees had subsequently asked Baltimore to resign.

"The senior faculty did not support him," Zinder said in a telephone interview. "In fact, I was quite surprised at the level of malaise" expressed at the meeting.

Zinder said that he had originally favored Baltimore's appointment but that he now considers his resignation as "the right thing for everybody. The university has been living in a state of chaos and uncertainty for two years, and now it can start to heal."

Rockefeller's public affairs office said in a statement that the trustees are expected to accept Baltimore's resignation at a regularly scheduled meeting today, and to ask a Rockefeller researcher, Torsten Wiesel, also a Nobel laureate, to serve as acting president.

In his letter to the board, Baltimore said the long-running dispute over his defense of a colleague who had allegedly faked data on a research paper that they coauthored had "created a climate of unhappiness among some in the University that could not be dispelled."

"Trying to govern the university under these conditions has taken a personal toll on me and my family which I can no longer tolerate," he wrote.

David Rockefeller, chairman of the executive committee, and Richard Furlaud, chairman of the board of trustees, replied to Baltimore in a letter praising him for his efforts to inject fresh talent and help the financially troubled university get back on its feet.

"Your tenure as president has been characterized by creative thinking and bold action," wrote Rockefeller and Furlaud. They added that "what makes this especially difficult for all of us is that an outstanding performance is being cut short."

Colleagues and friends of Baltimore also expressed sadness at the development.

"This is a loss for American science," commented Robert Weinberg, a noted cancer researcher at the Whitehead Institute. "I think it's a tragedy for the Rockefeller," he added, "because he had the power and the talents to really make the place over," and it "very much needed those talents."

It was an immunology paper published in the journal Cell in 1986, containing data from the MIT laboratory of Thereza Imanishi-Kari, that sparked one of the most hotly debated cases of alleged research fraud in recent years. Baltimore was an author on the report but the alleged manipulation of laboratory data has been laid to Imanishi-Kari in investigations by a Congressional subcommittee and the National Institutes of Health. A federal grand jury in Baltimore is investigating the case with an eye to possible
criminal charges.

Rep. John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, who made a specialty of pursuing the issue of alleged misuse of federal research funding, held hearings on the case and criticized Baltimore for having dismissed the claims of Margot O'Toole, a researcher in Imanishi-Kari's lab who said she found evidence of fabricated data.

Baltimore, highly respected by friends and foes alike but often described as arrogant as well as brilliant, launched a counterattack on Dingell, saying the congressman's investigation was a threat to scientific freedom.

Earlier this year, investigators in the NIH Office of Scientific Integrity said in a draft report that Baltimore's continued defense of the Cell paper -- he initially refused to withdraw the questioned data or any conclusions based on it -- was "difficult to comprehend" and was "deeply troubling."

In the wake of the report, Baltimore conceded that he had done too little to verify the disputed experiments himself, and he said he had been too willing to accept Imanishi-Kari's explanations for discrepancies in the paper. He formally apologized to O'Toole.

The controversy has continued unabated, however, largely in exchanges among various players in the case and other scientists in the pages of the British journal Nature.

Last July Paul Doty, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Harvard University, strongly criticized Baltimore, saying the case reflected a ''gradual departure from the traditional scientific standards." Doty also said that his apology, "though welcome, does not erase from the record the behavior that occurred and was defended over five years, and omits mention of many other actions."

Baltimore responded in a later issue of Nature with a withering attack on Doty, and he insisted that the data in the contested Cell paper "have proved more durable than the data in most papers." Further, he said, more data was forthcoming "that support the paper's results in remarkable detail."

Zinder and others interviewed by the Globe said in those statements that Baltimore appeared to be stepping back from his earlier concessions that the data in fact were flawed.

"I think he has essentially recanted his recantation," said Zinder, who indicated that this move only increased the antagonism of Rockefeller's senior faculty.

SALTUS;12/02 LDRISC;12/03,14:50 BALTIM03