Renato Dulbecco (1914-2012)

Abstract

When a gentle superman passes from our midst, we must bow our heads in recognition of his powers. Renato Dulbecco was both gentle and remarkable. He died on 19 February at his home in La Jolla, California. I got to know Renato when he invited me in 1965 to set up my first laboratory within his space at the then-nascent Salk Institute. He was moving from a professorship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he already had a notable career in virology. We were to share a Nobel Prize, with Howard Temin, just 10 years later. Renato was born in 1914 in Catanzaro, Italy. He was a student in the memorable pre–World War II laboratory of Giuseppe Levi at the University of Turin, along with two other Italians who, like him, came to America and won Nobel Prizes—Rita Levi-Montalcini and Salvador Luria. He became a physician, was conscripted into the Italian army to serve on the Russian front, defected, and became a partisan. Luria meanwhile had gone to France and then the United States. While at Indiana University he asked Renato to join him in Bloomington. In 1947, Renato went to Indiana as a research associate and began his great career in life science research.

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