Salvador Luria

Origins and early life

Salvador Edward Luria was born Salvatore Luria in Turin on 13 August 1912, the second son of David Luria, an accountant, and of his wife Esther. He graduated in medicine at the University of Turin in 1935, then studied radiology in Rome, where among the physicists around Enrico Fermi he came across Max Delbrück's ideas on the gene and chose bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria, to test them.

Work and career

In 1938, as Fascist Italy aligned itself with the antisemitic policies of Nazi Germany, he was barred as a Jew from academic research fellowships, and he left for Paris and the Institute of Radium. When the German army invaded France in June 1940 he rode a bicycle to Marseille for an American visa, sailed from Lisbon, reached New York on 12 September 1940 and took the name Salvador Edward Luria. With Fermi's help he obtained a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at Columbia, and with Delbrück and Alfred Hershey he founded the phage group, which met mainly in summer at Cold Spring Harbor.

At Indiana University in 1943 he and Delbrück devised the fluctuation test, which proved by statistics that bacteria mutate spontaneously into virus-resistant forms, and there his first graduate student was James Watson. At the University of Illinois from 1950 he discovered with Giuseppe Bertani that bacteria restrict the viruses grown in other strains, the origin of the restriction enzymes of genetic engineering, and in 1959 he moved to MIT.

Recognition

He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1969 with Delbrück and Hershey, for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses.

Later years

In 1972 he founded the centre for cancer research at MIT, his book Life: the Unfinished Experiment won the National Book Award in 1974, and he died in Lexington, Massachusetts, on 6 February 1991.