LURIA, SALVADOR EDWARD

LURIA, SALVADOR EDWARD (1912–1991), U.S. biologist and Nobel Prize winner. Born in Turin, Luria studied medicine at the university there working under giuseppe levi , and from 1938 to 1940 did research at the Institute of Radium in Paris. After the fall of France in 1940, Luria immigrated to the U.S., where he taught at Columbia (1940–42), Indiana University (1943–50), and the University of Illinois (1950–59), before becoming a professor of microbiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959. In 1964 he was appointed professor of biology at MIT. He was an associate editor of the Journal of Bacteriology (1950–55), editor of Virology from 1955, and published General Virology (1953–672). Luria was one of the pioneers of microbial genetics. In 1943, with Max Delbrueck, he showed that the appearance of bacteriophage-resistant strains of bacteria was the result of spontaneous mutations. The reasoning and design of this classic experiment became a model for subsequent research in vital and bacterial genetics. He dealt with lysogeny (the attachment of viral DNA to the bacterial chromosome), transduction (the transfer of genetic material from one bacterium to another by a virus), and the control of phage properties by the bacterial host. Luria's later experiments, employing novel techniques, extended the principles of genetics to viruses and bacteria and formed an essential part of the foundation of the new science of molecular biology. In 1969 Luria was a corecipient (with Max Delbrueck and Alfred Hershey) of the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine. (Mordecai L. Gabriel) Luria's open stance as a member of the peace movement may explain his appearing on a federal blacklist of 48 scientists drawn up by the National Institutes of Health in 1969. A critic of both American involvement in Vietnam and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, he was also an opponent of what he regarded as insufficient safeguards on nuclear power, and   in 1976 he and other scientists called for an end to the building of new atomic power plants. Luria founded the MIT Center for Cancer Research, and was director of the center from 1972 to 1985. In 1974 he won a National Book Award for Life: The Unfinished Experiment, a non-academic work. He officially retired from MIT in 1978, but remained active there. From 1984 he served as senior scientist for the biotechnology company, the Repligen Corporation. (Rohan Saxena (2nd ed.) -BIBLIOGRAPHY: McGraw-Hill Modern Men of Science (1966), S.V.