Luria, Salvador (Edward)

(born Aug. 13, 1912, Turin, Italy—died Feb. 6, 1991, Lexington, Mass., U.S.) Italian-born U.S. biologist. He fled Italy for France in 1938, arriving in the U.S. in 1940. In 1942 he obtained an electron micrograph of phage particles that confirmed earlier descriptions of them as consisting of a round head and a thin tail. In 1943 he and Max Delbrück showed that viruses can undergo permanent changes in their hereditary material. He also proved that the simultaneous existence of phage-resistant bacteria with phage-sensitive bacteria in the same culture was a result of the selection of spontaneous bacterial mutants. In 1945 he and A.D. Hershey demonstrated the existence not only of such bacterial mutants but also of spontaneous phage mutants. The three men shared a 1969 Nobel Prize.

Luria, Salvador (Edward) (1912–91) virologist; born in Turin, Italy. At the Curie Laboratory of the Institute of Radium, Paris (1938–40), he studied the effects of radiation on bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria). He then fled the Fascists by emigrating to teach at Columbia University (1940–42). As a research fellow at Vanderbilt (1942–43), he began at informal collaboration with bacteriophage scientists Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey. Luria pursued his bacteriophage research at the Universities of Indiana (1943–50) and Illinois (1950–59), demonstrating both the effects of bacteriophage genetic material on host bacteria, and spontaneous mutations in bacteriophages. With Delbrück and Hershey, Luria won the 1969 Nobel Prize in physiology. He joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1959–78) and was founding director of MIT's Center for Cancer Research (1972–85). He published General Virology, the first text of virology as an independent science (1953), was an editor and adviser to many professional journals, and remained active after retirement, as both a scholar and a peace activist.