Salvador LuriaBorn 13 Aug 1912; died 6 Feb 1991 at age 78.Salvador Edward Luria was an Italian-American microbiologist who (with Max Delbrück and Alfred Day Hershey) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1969 for their discoveries concerning “the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses.” From around 1940, they had investigated bacteriophages, a type of virus that infects bacteria, rather than ordinary cells. These offered as simple a living system as possible to research fundamental life processes, especially self-replication. Eventually, they demonstrated the role of nucleic acid as the carrier of the genetic information of the virus. Because of the short reproduction time, further information came from bacteriophages more quickly than work with other virus material.« |
