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Salvador Luria | |
|---|---|
 Luriac. 1969 | |
| Born | Salvatore Luria August 13, 1912 (1912-08-13) |
| Died | February 6, 1991(1991-02-06) (aged 78) Lexington, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Citizenship | Italian American (since 1950) |
| Alma mater | University of Turin |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 1 |
| Awards | John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1942) Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1969) Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (1969) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Molecular biology |
| Institutions | Columbia University Indiana University University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Doctoral students | James D. Watson Jon Kabat-Zinn |
Salvador Edward Luria (/ˈlʊəriə/;[1]Italian:[ˈluːrja]; bornSalvatore Luria; August 13, 1912 – February 6, 1991) was an Italianmicrobiologist, later anaturalized U.S. citizen. He won theNobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, withMax Delbrück andAlfred Hershey, for their discoveries on the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses. Salvador Luria also showed that bacterial resistance to viruses (phages) is genetically inherited.
Luria was born Salvatore Luria inTurin, Italy to an influential ItalianSephardi Jewish family. His parents were Davide and Ester (Sacerdote) Luria.[2] He attended the medical school at theUniversity of Turin studying withGiuseppe Levi. There, he met two other futureNobel laureates:Rita Levi-Montalcini andRenato Dulbecco. He obtained his M. D.summa cum laude in 1935. From 1936 to 1937, Luria served his required time in the Italian army as a medical officer. He then took classes inradiology at theUniversity of Rome. Here, he was introduced toMax Delbrück's theories on thegene as a molecule and began to formulate methods for testing genetic theory with thebacteriophages,viruses that infectbacteria.
In 1938, he received a fellowship to study in the United States, where he intended to work with Delbrück. Soon after Luria received the award,Benito Mussolini'sfascist regime banned Jews from academic research fellowships. Without funding sources for work in the U.S. or Italy, Luria left his home country for Paris, France in 1938. As theNazi German armies invaded France in 1940, Luria fled on bicycle toMarseille where he received an immigrationvisa to the United States.
Luria arrived in New York City on September 12, 1940, and soon changed his first and middle names. With the help of physicistEnrico Fermi, whom he knew from his time at the University of Rome, Luria received aRockefeller Foundation fellowship atColumbia University. He soon met Delbrück and Hershey, and they collaborated on experiments atCold Spring Harbor Laboratory and in Delbrück's lab atVanderbilt University.[3]
His famous experiment with Delbrück in 1943,[4][5] known as theLuria–Delbrück experiment, demonstrated statistically that inheritance in bacteria must followDarwinian rather thanLamarckian principles and thatmutant bacteria occurring randomly can still bestow viral resistance without the virus being present. The idea that natural selection affects bacteria has profound consequences, for example, it explains how bacteria developantibiotic resistance.
Luria and Latarjet in 1947 published a quantitative analysis on the effect ofultraviolet irradiation onbacteriophage multiplication during intracellular growth.[6] During the early course of infection they found an increase in bacteriophage resistance to ultraviolet irradiation and then later a decrease. At the time this pattern, known as the Luria-Laterjet effect, was published little was known about the central role ofDNA in biology. Later work established that multiple specificDNA repair pathways, encoded by the infecting bacteriophage, contribute to the increase in UV resistance early in infection.[7]
From 1943 to 1950, he worked atIndiana University. His first graduate student wasJames D. Watson, who went on to discover the structure ofDNA withFrancis Crick. In January 1947, Luria became anaturalized citizen of the United States.
In 1950, Luria moved to theUniversity of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. In the early 1950s, Luria and Giuseppe Bertani discovered the phenomenon ofhost-controlled restriction and modification of a bacterial virus: a culture ofE. coli can significantly reduce the production of phages grown in other strains; however, once the phage become established in that strain, they also become restricted in their ability to grow in other strains.[8][9] It was later discovered by other researchers that bacteria produceenzymes that cut viral DNA at particular sequences but not the bacteria's own DNA, which is protected bymethylation. These enzymes became known asrestriction enzymes and developed into one of the main molecular tools inmolecular biology.[10]
Luria won theNobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, withMax Delbrück andAlfred Hershey, for their discoveries on the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses.[11]
In 1959, he became chair of Microbiology at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At MIT, he switched his research focus from phages tocell membranes andbacteriocins.[citation needed] While on sabbatical in 1963 to study at theInstitut Pasteur in Paris, he found that bacteriocins impair the function of cell membranes. Returning to MIT, his lab discovered that bacteriocins achieve this impairment by forming holes in the cell membrane, allowingions to flow through and destroy theelectrochemical gradient of cells. In 1972, he became chair of TheCenter for Cancer Research at MIT. The department he established included future Nobel Prize winnersDavid Baltimore,Susumu Tonegawa,Phillip Allen Sharp andH. Robert Horvitz.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Luria received a number of awards and recognitions. He was elected to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959.[12] He was named a member of theNational Academy of Sciences in 1960.[13] In 1964, he was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society.[14] From 1968 to 1969, he served as president of theAmerican Society for Microbiology. In 1969, he was awarded theLouisa Gross Horwitz Prize fromColumbia University together withMax Delbrück, co-winner with Luria of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969. In the U.S. he won the 1974National Book Awardin Science for hispopular science bookLife: the Unfinished Experiment[15]and received theNational Medal of Science in 1991.[16]
Throughout his career, Luria was an outspoken political advocate.[17][18] He joined withLinus Pauling in 1957 to protest against nuclear weapon testing. Luria was an opponent of theVietnam War and a supporter oforganized labor. In the 1970s, he was involved in debates overgenetic engineering, advocating a compromise position of moderate oversight and regulation rather than the extremes of a complete ban or full scientific freedom. Due to his political involvement, he wasblacklisted from receiving funding from theNational Institutes of Health for a short time in 1969.
Noam Chomsky describes him as a friend, and claims that Luria attempted to influence Jewish American writerElie Wiesel's public stance on Israel.[2][19]
Luria died inLexington, Massachusetts of a heart attack on 6 February 1991 at the age of 78.
