Luria, Salvador E

Italian-born American physician Salvador E. Luria (1912–1991) was one of the founding fathers of bacterial genetics and molecular biology. Trained at the laboratory of the distinguished histologist Giuseppe Levi at the University of Turin and then in Rome with the school of physics Enrico Fermi, Luria was forced by the racial laws to emigrate to the United States. In 1943, together with the émigré German physicist Max Delbrück, he elaborated the ‘fluctuation test’ showing that the adaptive mechanisms of bacteria to virus (bacteriophages) attacks were attributable to the Darwinian principle of natural selection. For these pioneering research, and for founding the ‘phage group’, a sort of Mecca of the first molecular biologists, he obtained in 1969 the Nobel Prize for medicine. Politically engaged, Luria conduced in open contrast with American governments various battles for civil rights and pacifism.