Renato Dulbecco

Dulbecco, Renato 

Born Feb. 22, 1914, in Catanzaro, Italy. American virologist. Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1974) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; foreign member of the Royal Society and Nazionale Academia dei Lincei.

Dulbecco graduated from the University of Turin in 1936 and taught histology and embryology there from 1942. He emigrated to the United States in 1947. He was professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology from 1952 to 1963 and worked in the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in San Diego, Calif., from 1963 to 1971. In 1971 he moved to London to work in the laboratory of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. He became deputy director of research at the fund in 1974.

Dulbecco’s main works have dealt with tumor-forming DNA-containing viruses. He developed techniques for transforming cells in tissue culture that are now widely used to study tumor-forming DNA-containing viruses. Another major discovery of Dulbecco’s is that the genome of a tumor-forming DNA-containing virus is incorporated into the genetic material of the cell, a phenomenon that causes a normal cell to become malignant.

In 1975, Dulbecco shared a Nobel Prize with H. Temin and D. Baltimore.