Italian-born US physician
who was a pioneer in molecular biology, especially the genetic structure
of viruses. Luria was a pacifist and was identified with efforts to keep
science humanistic. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine
1969.
Luria was born in Turin. He left Fascist Italy 1938, going first to France,
where he became a research fellow at the Institut du Radium in Paris,
and then to the USA 1940. From 1943 he taught at a number of universities
and in 1959 became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT). He founded the MIT Center for Cancer Research, which he directed
1972-85. For some time he taught a course in world literature to graduate
students at MIT and at Harvard Medical School to ensure their involvement
in the arts. |