biography
pronunciation:
[dulbekoh]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1914– )
|
| biography:
| Virologist, born in Catanzaro, Italy. He performed research at Turin (1940–7), then went to the USA as a bacteriologist at the University of Indiana (1947–9), 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 he conducted research on polio viruses that contributed to the development of a polio vaccine. In the early 1950s he began studies of mammalian tumour 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. With them he shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his contribution to the study of cellular changes due to cancer-inducing viruses. He joined the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1963–72), relocated to London to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (1972–7), became a professor at the University of California, San Diego (1977–81), and then returned to the Salk Institute (1977), of which he became president (1988). |
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