Renato Dulbecco Italian and American virologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975 Date of Birth: 22.02.1914 Country: USA

Biography of Renato Dulbecco

Renato Dulbecco, an Italian-American virologist and Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine in 1975, was born in the south of Italy. His early years were marked by the outbreak of the First World War, during which his father, Leonardo Dulbecco, was drafted into the Italian army. Renato, along with his mother Maria and his siblings, spent the war years in Turin and Cuneo in northern Italy. After the war, the family moved to the province of Liguria, where Renato received his primary education.

In his youth, Renato developed an interest in physics and built an electronic seismograph, one of the first devices of its kind. At the age of 16, after completing secondary school, he enrolled at the University of Turin to study medicine and biology. It was during this time that he discovered his passion for biology and began working in the laboratory of Giuseppe Levi, a professor of anatomy and histology. Here, Renato learned cell culture techniques and had the opportunity to collaborate with influential figures such as Salvador Luria and Rita Levi-Montalcini, whose influence he later highly valued.

After obtaining his medical degree in 1936, Renato was called to serve as a medical officer in the Italian army. After two years of military service, he returned to Turin to continue his work in pathology, but his research was once again interrupted by the outbreak of World War II in 1939. During the early years of the war, he served in France for a period of time before fighting on the German-Soviet front as part of the Italian forces. He was wounded in 1942 and spent several months in a hospital. Following the fall of Mussolini's government and during the subsequent German occupation, he participated in the Italian Resistance movement, providing medical aid to the partisans.

After the war, Renato became an assistant professor of experimental embryology in Turin. In 1946, his mentor Luria, who had moved to the United States and become a professor at Indiana University, spent the summer in Turin. Based on Luria's recommendation, Renato left Italy the following year and joined the bacteriology department at Indiana University in Bloomington. It was there, in the 1940s, that Luria developed quantitative experimental methods for studying the genetics of bacteria and bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria). Using Luria's experimental approaches, Renato began his studies on phages.

His work in Bloomington soon caught the attention of Max Delbrück, who in 1949 offered Renato a position as a senior research fellow at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. After moving from Indiana to Oregon and then to the West Coast, Renato was enamored with the beauty and vastness of the United States and the friendliness of its people. At the institute, he continued his study of bacteriophages until the mid-1950s when Delbrück proposed that he investigate animal viruses that were similar to bacteriophages but infected animal cells.

In his experiments, Renato utilized Luria and Delbrück's quantitative methods to study the poliovirus and Rous sarcoma virus (discovered by Peyton Rous), leading to the development of a more effective polio vaccine. In 1952, Renato became an adjunct professor of biology and in 1954, a full professor. His interests gradually shifted towards studying tumor viruses and tumor cells. Together with Howard M. Temin, a senior student, Renato focused on the genetics of the Rous sarcoma virus. He also studied the polyoma virus, which caused multiple tumors in mice, and the simian virus 40, which caused leukemia in monkeys.

Through the development of a method for quantifying tumor cells in cell cultures, Renato and his colleagues discovered that tumor cells were transformed by tumor viruses in a way that allowed them to divide indefinitely. They termed this process "cellular transformation." Through studying the biological characteristics of tumor cells, they found that while normal cells received signals from the cell regulatory system to stop dividing when invading neighboring tissues, tumor cells had a damaged regulatory system. Temin hypothesized that cellular transformation was caused by the viral genome integrating into the cell's DNA. This provirus hypothesis suggested that the genetic code of certain RNA viruses could be transcribed into the cell's DNA by an enzyme, called reverse transcriptase, located in the viral protein coat, allowing the viral genes to control the host cell's genes. This enzyme, later named reverse transcriptase, was indeed discovered by Temin and David Baltimore. RNA viruses possessing reverse transcriptase and forming proviral genes are now known as retroviruses and are believed to be responsible for diseases such as hepatitis, AIDS, and certain types of cancer.

In 1963, Renato became a senior staff member at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, where he led a group of scientists studying the regulatory systems of tumor cell growth. He remained at the Salk Institute until 1972 when he became the Deputy Director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London. There, he focused on the clinical application of his previous findings on tumor viruses.

For their research on the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of cells, Dulbecco, Baltimore, and Temin shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975. Their discoveries provided scientists with a framework for understanding the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of cells, as well as a means to identify malignant tumors caused by tumor viruses in humans. In his Nobel lecture, Renato noted the growing disconnect between science and society and the detrimental effects this had on biologists. He emphasized the need to address the production and contamination of the environment with carcinogenic substances while scientists work tirelessly to understand and prevent cancer.

Renato continued his scientific contributions as a renowned professor at the Salk Institute. He received numerous awards, including the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (1964), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University (1973), and the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology from the National Academy of Sciences (1974). He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a foreign member of the Royal Society and the Italian National Academy of Sciences. Renato also received honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Glasgow, and the University of Vrije in Belgium.

In 1940, Renato married Josephine Salva, with whom he had a son and a daughter. After their divorce in 1963, he married Maureen Myueir in the same year, and they had a daughter together.