Renato Dulbecco Biography

Renato Dulbecco was an Italian American virologist who won a share of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1975. A medical researcher, he performed significant work on oncoviruses, the viruses that can cause cancer when they infect animal cells. A good student from a young age, he was deeply influenced by an uncle who was a respected physician. Motivated by him, Dulbecco decided to study medicine at the University of Turin and graduated in morbid anatomy and pathology under the supervision of Professor Giuseppe Levi. He served in the Italian army in World War II, but later joined the resistance. After the war, he moved to the United States and began his research on viruses. After working with Salvador Luria on bacteriophages, he moved to Caltech on the invitation of Max Delbrück and joined his group. It was here that he began his seminal work on animal oncoviruses, especially of polyoma family. Over the course of his career, he collaborated with several other brilliant scientists including his student Howard Temin and the cancer biologist and virologist Marguerite Vogt. While working at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute), he was a part of the team that launched the Human Genome Project.