Renato Dulbecco

Renato Dulbecco (born February 22, 1914, Catanzaro, Italy—died February 19, 2012, La Jolla, California, U.S.) was an Italian American virologist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1975 with Howard M. Temin and David Baltimore, both of whom had studied under him.

Dulbecco obtained an M.D. from the University of Turin in 1936 and remained there several years as a member of its faculty. He came to the United States in 1947 and studied viruses, first with Salvador Luria at Indiana University, then at the California Institute of Technology (1949–63). In 1953 Dulbecco became a U.S. citizen. He was a fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California (1963–72), and returned there in 1977 as a distinguished research professor after serving for five years as a director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London. During his second tenure at the Salk Institute, he served also on the faculty of the medical school of the University of California, San Diego (1977–81). He served first as temporary and then as full president of the Salk Institute from 1988 to 1992. Dulbecco was asked to work on the Italian Genome Project by the Italian National Research Council before returning to the Salk Institute in the late 1990s.

Dulbecco, with Marguerite Vogt, pioneered the growing of animal viruses in culture in the 1950s and investigated how certain viruses gain control of the cells they infect. They showed that polyomavirus, which produces tumours in mice, inserts its DNA into the DNA of the host cell. The cell then undergoes transformation (a term used in this restricted sense by Dulbecco) into a cancer cell, reproducing the viral DNA along with its own and producing more cancer cells. Dulbecco suggested that human cancers could be caused by similar reproduction of foreign DNA fragments.