Renato Dulbecco ( ,[ "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1975". Nobelprize.org. 12 Sep 2012][ Nobel autobiography of Dulbecco][ Renato Dulbecco telling his story at Web of Stories] He studied at the University of Turin under Giuseppe Levi, along with fellow students Salvador Luria and Rita Levi-Montalcini, who also moved to the U.S. with him and won Nobel prizes. He was drafted into the Italian army in World War II, but later joined the resistance.
Early life
Dulbecco was born in
Catanzaro (
Calabria, Southern Italy), but spent his childhood and grew up in
Liguria, in the coastal city
Imperia. He graduated from high school at 16, then moved to the University of Turin. Despite a strong interest in
mathematics and
physics, he decided to study
medicine. At only 22, he graduated in morbid
anatomy and
pathology under the supervision of professor
Giuseppe Levi. During these years he met
Salvador Luria and Rita Levi-Montalcini, whose friendship and encouragement would later bring him to the
United States. In 1936 he was called up for military service as a medical officer, and later (1938) discharged. In 1940
Italy entered World War II and Dulbecco was recalled and sent to the front in
France and
Russia, where he was wounded. After hospitalization and the collapse of
Fascism, he joined the resistance against the
Germany occupation.
[
]
Career and research
After the war he resumed his work at Levi's laboratory, but soon he moved, together with Levi-Montalcini, to the U.S., where, at Indiana University, he worked with Salvador Luria on . In the summer of 1949 he moved to Caltech, joining Max Delbrück's group (see Phage group). In the early 1950s, on Delbruck's advice, Dulbecco visited the major centers of animal virus work in the US in order to discover a way to quantitatively assay animal viruses by a plaque technique, similar to the technique that had recently been developed for bacteriophage. Within less than a year, he worked out such a method for Western equine encephalitis virus,
Throughout this time he also worked with Marguerite Vogt. In 1962, he moved to the Salk Institute and then in 1972 to The Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now named the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute) where he was first appointed associate professor and then full professor.
Nobel Prize
Dulbecco and his group demonstrated that the infection of normal cells with certain types of viruses (oncoviruses) led to the incorporation of virus-derived into the host-cell genome, and that this event lead to the transformation (the acquisition of a tumor phenotype) of those cells. As demonstrated by Temin and Baltimore, who shared the Nobel Prize with Dulbecco, the transfer of viral genes to the cell is mediated by an enzyme called reverse transcriptase (or, more precisely, RNA-dependent DNA polymerase), which replicates the viral genome (in this case made of RNA) into DNA, which is later incorporated in the host genome.
Oncoviruses are the cause of some forms of human . Dulbecco's study gave a basis for a precise understanding of the molecule mechanisms by which they propagate, thus allowing humans to better fight them. Furthermore, the mechanisms of carcinogenesis mediated by oncoviruses closely resemble the process by which normal cells degenerate into cancer cells. Dulbecco's discoveries allowed humans to better understand and fight cancer. In addition, it is well known that in the 1980s and 1990s, an understanding of reverse transcriptase and of the origins, nature, and properties of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV, of which there are two well-understood serotypes, HIV-1, and the less-common and less virulent HIV-2), the virus which, if unchecked, ultimately causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), led to the development of the first group of drugs that could be considered successful against the virus, the reverse-transcriptase inhibitors, of which zidovudine is a well-known example. These drugs are still used today as one part of the highly-active antiretroviral therapy drug cocktail that is in contemporary use.
Other awards
In 1965 he received the Marjory Stephenson Prize from the Society for General Microbiology. That same year, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
External links
