Luria, Salvador Edward

(b. 13 August 1912 in Turin, Italy; d. 6 February 1991 in Lexington, Massachusetts), micro-biologist whose research on the genetics of viruses and bacteria earned him the Nobel Prize in 1969.

Born Salvatore Luria and nicknamed “Salva,” Luria belonged to a middle-class branch of an old and proud Jewish family. His father, David Luria, an accountant, and his well-read mother, Esther Sacerdote, a homemaker, encouraged a refined intellectualism. Salva’s older brother was an early role model. As Fascism developed in Italy, Luria responded to the liberal socialism of a rebellious high school literature teacher. His lifelong friend, Ugo Fano, inspired an interest in physics and pure science. Not a passionate student, Salva chose medical school and graduated from the University of Turin in 1935, unenthusiastic about treating patients.

Luria served his internship in the medical histology laboratory of Giuseppe Levi, where he learned experimental techniques and maintained (as he would throughout life) an active interest in literature. Attempting to combine the strengths of medicine and physics, Luria then joined a radiology laboratory. During this time he served for eighteen months (and he reported, ineptly) in the Italian army.

Looking to prepare for a career in science, Luria affiliated in 1937 as a radiologist with the physics laboratory of Enrico Fermi at the University of Rome. During this period Luria was exposed to the German physicist Max Delbruück’s ideas regarding the molecular nature of the gene. The bacteriologist Gio Rita introduced Luria to bacteriophage viruses and to related laboratory techniques. Just when Luria won an Italian government fellowship to travel to Delbrück’s laboratory in Berkeley, California, the Fascist racial laws (which among other laws, excluded Jews from any government position and most other positions of responsibility) were passed and Luria’s fellowship disappeared.

While his family stayed, suffered, and survived the Fascist era and the war, Luria was eager to cut his ties to the past and create a new future. He emigrated first to Paris in 1938 and worked at the Institute of Radium on the effects of radiation on bacteriophage. Paris provided ample opportunity for him to exercise his interest in radical socialist politics. After enduring the fall of Paris to the German army on 14 May 1940, Luria departed by bicycle, making his way toward Lisbon with the help of expatriate Italians. Having obtained a U.S. visa in Marseilles, he entered New York Harbor on 12 September 1940 with $52 and the clothes on his back.

Enrico Fermi, then at Columbia University, helped Luria obtain a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to continue his research at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Luria applied immediately for citizenship, using the opportunity to adopt the Spanish variant of his name and transposing the truncated “e” to a new middle name: Edward. (Naturalization followed in 1947.) In December 1940 he met Delbrüiick at a conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and began a collaboration that was to last many years. Later their collaboration included Alfred Hershey. The three formed the core of the “phage group” that received the Nobel Prize in 1969. The field of study using the viruses that infect bacteria yielded valuable information on the subcellular mechanisms of mutation and reproduction. Delbriick was at Vanderbilt University, but they were able to work closely during summers at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, alongside such leading geneticists as Hermann Müller and Barbara McClintock.

In 1941, with T. F. Anderson, Luria used one of the first electron microscopes to obtain a picture of bacteriophage. This significant achievement and others won for Luria a Guggenheim fellowship that he used to join research teams at Vanderbilt and Princeton.

In January 1943 Luria joined the faculty of Indiana University, where he proved to be an enthusiastic and popular professor. In the laboratory he demonstrated spontaneous mutations in bacteria, and Delbrück worked out the mathematical explanation for these events. Luria discovered the reactivation of bacteriophage killed by radiation, opening the field of DNA repair studies. His first graduate student at Indiana in 1947 was James Watson, who later elucidated the molecular structure of the gene and was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize. Renato Dulbecco, also associated with Luria at Indiana, won the 1975 Nobel Prize for his work on the cultures of viruses and tumor cells.

Luria married Zella Hurwitz, then a graduate psychology student, on 18 April 1945. Their only child was born in 1948. In 1950 the Lurias moved to the University of Illinois, which was building a strong biochemistry and genetics program based on the research of Irwin Gunsalus and Sol Spiegelman. Luria continued his work on bacteriophage, discovering the restriction modification phenomenon, which was to become the foundation of genetic engineering.

In 1951 Luria was refused a passport as a result of his outspoken political activism. His socialism and commitment to justice and equality drew him to many causes, and he affiliated with like-minded intellectuals. He opposed McCarthyism and nuclear testing and supported organized labor and civil rights. He was still on the blacklist of the National Institutes of Health and actively opposing the Vietnam War when he learned of winning the Nobel Prize in 1969. He felt that his life in the Midwest contributed significantly to his personal sense of identity as an American intellectual.

The Midwest period came to an end in 1958 with a sabbatical year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which offered him a faculty position in 1959. Luria was given the authority to build a strong biology department at MIT, while Zella joined the faculty at Tufts University. Luria was director of the Center for Cancer Research at MIT from 1974 to 1985, although he retired from most other official duties in 1978. The Lurias’ extensive involvement in the Boston and Cambridge communities was based as much on social and political interests as on scientific interests.

Luria’s writings, aside from scores of specialized scientific papers, drew a wide readership. His early textbook General Virology (1953) went through four editions. Life: The Unfinished Experiment (1973), a book written for the general public, won the National Book Award for science. A View of Life (1981), a beginning biology text written with Stephen Jay Gould and Sam Singer, was an admittedly unsuccessful attempt to reap the royalties that come from popular school titles. His autobiography, published in 1984, was a successful attempt to write a more literary than scientific narrative.

Luria died of a heart attack at his home in suburban Lexington, on 6 February 1991. Through his original experiments and as a prolific and persuasive writer and teacher, Luria contributed heavily to the growth and synthesis of the discoveries that formed the prevailing paradigm of molecular biology.

The personal papers of Salvador Luria are housed at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Luria’s autobiography, A Slot Machine, A Broken Test Tube: An Autobiography (1984), is a personal memoir containing as much motivational revelation as scientific explication. A biographical article by Tom Crawford is in Emily J. McMurray, ed., Notable Twentieth Century Scientists, vol. 3 (1995). Obituaries are in the New York Times (7 Feb. 1991) and Genetics 131 (May 1992): 1-4.

Michael F. Haines