Caltech's Baltimore to step back

Nobel laureate David Baltimore will give up his post as president of Caltech at the end of the academic year. Baltimore plans to return to the life of a professor of biology. The Pasadena Star-News and San Gabriel Valley Tribune say that Baltimore's decision "comes less than a week after he informed the Caltech community of the institute's $28 million general budget deficit and expected cuts and tuition hikes. But his decision to step down was completely independent of the budgetary woes, according to Baltimore, Provost Paul Jennings and Caltech Board of Trustees Chairman Kent Kresa." Baltimore says:

"I analyzed a lot of things about myself and my position in the world and my age and where my satisfactions were and I decided that, on a personal basis, this was a time to think about it. And as I thought about Caltech, I recognized that we had a lot of things in place and had done a lot of things and it wasn't a bad time to have a transition."

Baltimore won the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1975, when he was 37 years old, for discoveries in the field of animal viruses.