Renato Dulbecco

Renato Dulbecco was an Italian-born physician and virologist, born in Catanzaro on 22 February 1914 and dying in La Jolla, California, on 19 February 2012. He took his medical degree at Turin in 1936, working under the anatomist Giuseppe Levi alongside Salvador Luria and Rita Levi-Montalcini, and served as a medical officer and later as physician to partisan units in the Italian Resistance. In 1975 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with David Baltimore and Howard Temin for discoveries concerning the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell. During the 1950s he and his colleagues proved that genetic material from a virus is incorporated into the genes of the host, work centred on DNA tumour viruses that also proved fundamental to understanding RNA viruses.