David’s scientific trajectory began in New York, where he was born in 1938, and gathered momentum through his undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College and his PhD at Rockefeller University. After postdoctoral work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and a brief stint at the Salk Institute, he joined the MIT faculty, where he quickly established a reputation as a brilliant and daring young scientist. His independent discovery of reverse transcriptase, in parallel with Howard Temin, overturned the prevailing view that genetic information flowed in one direction, from DNA to RNA to protein. Instead, David demonstrated that RNA viruses could copy their RNA genomes into DNA.
Over the decades that followed, David’s scientific contributions remained astonishing in scope. His laboratory identified critical regulators of the immune system, including the NF-κB/Rel family of transcription factors, and made major advances in understanding V(D)J recombination through the discovery of the RAG1 and RAG2 genes. His group also revealed the transforming potential of tyrosine kinases and made pioneering advances in understanding polio and human immunodeficiency virus. These achievements were not isolated strokes of insight but part of a sustained and fertile research program that reverberated across multiple fields simultaneously.
