system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Who is the most influential living person in your field of choice?

obviously this is a hard question to answer as I'm sure there are numerous amounts of influential people in your field

but if you had to pinpoint too one person within your field as having the greatest influence who would it be?
gpt
Easy pick: David Baltimore. For multiple fields! Simplifying the credit here, but...
    
...he discovered reverse-transcriptase, basically revealing the class of "retroviruses" and overturning a lot of dogma. This was **huge** and a lot of younger scientists today don't understand how big of a deal it was.   
...really contributed to understanding the roles of viruses and cancer, and helped kick off massive cancer research funding (and earned the Nobel Prize at age 37)  
...he essentially started the Whitehead Institute (and obviously held important positions at MIT, Rockefeller, and Caltech too)  
...he helped organize the infamous Asilomar Conference about recombinant DNA back in the '70s.  
...he discovered the NF-kB transcription factor, which led to a massive explosion of research on signaling  
...his lab discovered recombination-activiting genes 1 and 2, which are super important in immunology. His students actually did a ton of other ground breaking research in related fields too  
...has absolutely influenced public policy on science, and still runs a big, active lab while still being involved in public policy (ie, the CRISPR summit in Washington DC late last year).   
  
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn't consider him among the most influential living biomedical scientists.