Dulbecco, Renato

(1914– )

   A virologist who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1975, Dulbecco was born in the Calabrian town of Catanzaro and brought up in Imperia in Liguria. He studied biology and medicine at the University of Turinand was called up to the army in 1936. He served as a soldier on the Russian front during the war, where he was hospitalized by a wound and sent home. Dulbecco joined the resistance as a doctor and served on the Turin Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale/Committee of National Liberation (CLN). In 1947, he left to work in the United States, at the same time as his friend and fellow Nobel prize-winners Rita Levi-Montalcini and Salvatore Luria. Dulbecco subsequently worked at the University of Indiana, the California Institute of Technology, the Salk Institute, and, starting in 1962, in London at the cancer institute at Imperial College. He returned to Italy only in 1993 to become president of the Institute of Biomedical Technologies at the National Council for Research in Rome. Dulbeco won the Nobel Prize (shared with Howard Temin and David Baltimore) for his work on “the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell.” His work has been a major step forward in the fight to treat and cure cancer. Dulbecco was one of the founders, in 1986, of the human genome project.