Renato Dulbecco

Dulbecco, Renato

(1914–  ) virologist; born in Catanzaro, Italy. He performed research at Turin (1940–47), then came to the U.S.A. as a bacteriologist at the University of Indiana (1947–49), where he worked with his former Turin colleague Salvador Luria on bacterial viruses. He moved to the California Institute of Technology (1949–63) at the invitation of Max Delbrück, under whose direction Dulbecco conducted research on polioviruses that contributed to the development of a polio vaccine. In the early 1950s he began studies of mammalian tumor viruses. His discoveries of virus-induced cell transformation led to the discovery of the enzyme RNA transcriptase by his students Howard Temin and David Baltimore. Dulbecco shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in physiology with Temin and Baltimore for his contribution to the study of cellular changes due to cancer-inducing viruses. Dulbecco joined the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1963–72), relocated to London to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (1972–77), became a professor at the University of California: San Diego (1977–81), then returned to the Salk Institute (1977), of which he became president (1988).

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

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.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.