Peoples Archive is happy to present the stories of Renato Dulbecco as the newest addition to it's science section. Speaking in his native Italian he talks about his life in science, these stories are available to view with or without English subtitles.
Renato Dulbecco was born in Catanzaro the 22nd of February 1914 to a Calabrian mother and Ligurian father. In 1930, at the age of only 16, Dulbecco signed up to study Medicine at Turin Universiy where he met the future Nobel prize winners Salvador Luria and Rita Levi-Montalcini. Graduating at 22 he was then instantly called-up for military service as a medical officer.
In 1947, called over by Salvador Luria, he emigrated to the United States to work at the University of Bloomington in Indiana. During 1955, whilst working at Caltech he isolated the first mutant of the Polio virus, which was subsequently used by Albert Sabin in the preparation of his vaccine. In 1958 Dulbecco concentrated his research on viruses which cause tumours, describing the interactions between virus and cell, foundations for research which later won him the Nobel Prize.
In 1962 he transfered to the Salk Institute of la Jolla California, where he worked with the American molecular biologist David Baltimore. In 1972 he moves with his family to London, where he begins to work at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories, still in the field of tumours induced by viruses. Soon after, in 1975 he is awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine together with David Baltimore and Howard Temin for their work on the interaction between cancer cells and viruses.
As well as winning the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1975 Renato Dulbecco has also won the Lasker Medical Science Award in 1964. He is a member if the National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Society.
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