Luria, Salvador Edward (1912-1991), an Italian-born American biologist, shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with German-born American biophysicist Max Delbruck and American biologist Alfred Hershey for their work with bacteriophages (viruses that attack bacteria). In 1943, Luria and Delbruck showed that the genetic material of viruses undergoes changes in successive generations similar to those that occur in more complicated organisms. They had previously thought that viruses had only one gene which was replicated.
Luria was born in Turin, Italy, and graduated from the University of Turin in 1935. In 1940, he moved to the United States and, in 1947, he became a naturalized American citizen. He was a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington from 1943 to 1950, and at the University of Illinois in Urbana from 1950 to 1959. He then became professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was appointed director of the Center for Cancer Research there in 1974.
