American biologist David Baltimore, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery of the mechanisms of genetic information transfer, has died at the age of 87, according to The New York Times.

Baltimore died on September 6 at his home in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. His wife, Alice Huang, said the cause of death was complications from several types of cancer. 

According to the publication, Baltimore was only 37 when he made the discovery that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1975. Previously, it was believed that information in cells moved in only one direction — from DNA to RNA and to protein synthesis. Baltimore experimentally showed that information can also be transferred in the opposite direction—from RNA to DNA. The key discovery was a viral enzyme called reverse transcriptase, which reverses this process.

This discovery led to an understanding of retroviruses and viruses, including HIV, that use this enzyme.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Baltimore has received a number of other awards and honors, including the US National Medal of Science.

In an interview, Baltimore said that his parents were the children of immigrants from the Russian Empire. His mother was the daughter of a tailor from Odessa.