Salvador Luria

Salvador E. Luria married Zella Hurwitz in 1945. His wife was a Professor of Psychology at Tufts University. They had one son, Daniel, who went on to become an economist.

He died of a heart attack on February 6, 1991, aged 78.

He was born Salvatore Edoardo Luria, in Turin, Italy, on August 13, 1912. His parents Ester (Sacerdote) and Davide Luria hailed from an influential Italian Sephardi Jewish family.

He went to the medical school at the University of Turin where he became acquainted with two other future Nobel laureates: Rita Levi-Montalcini and Renato Dulbecco. He graduated with an M. D. summa cum laude in 1935.

He served in the Italian Army as a medical officer during 1936-37 following which he enrolled for classes in radiology at the University of Rome. It was here that he developed an interest in bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria—and conducted genetic theory experiments on them.

In 1938, he received a fellowship to study in the United States. At that time Italy was reeling under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini which prohibited Jews from academic research fellowships.

Frustrated at being denied this chance, Luria left Italy for Paris, France. The chaotic situation in Europe continued and the Nazi German armies invaded France in 1940. Luria was now forced to flee France as well. Fortunately he was able to receive an immigration visa to the United States.

After arriving in the United States he changed the spelling of his name to Salvador Edward Luria. He was acquainted with the physicist Enrico Fermi who helped Luria receive a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at Columbia University.

He met Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey over the course of his research and the trio performed experiments at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and in Delbrück's lab at Vanderbilt University.

Delbrück introduced Luria to the American Phage Group, an informal scientific group dedicated to the study of viral self-replication. Luria was successful in obtaining one of the electron micrographs of phage particles while working with a member of the group.

Luria and Delbrück formed a very fruitful professional collaboration. In 1943 they performed what became known as the Luria–Delbrück experiment which demonstrated that in bacteria, genetic mutations arise in the absence of selection, rather than being a response to selection.

From 1943 to 1950 he served as the Instructor, Assistant Professor, and Associate Professor of Bacteriology at Indiana University. Luria became a naturalized citizen of the United States in January 1947.

Working along with Delbrück he made significant discoveries on the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses, and showed that bacterial resistance to viruses (phages) is genetically inherited. Luria also proved the existence of spontaneous phage mutants.