Salvador Luria was born in Turin, Italy, in 1912. After receiving his degree in medicine, he moved to Paris where he was engaged in research at the Pasteur Institute until France fell to the Germans in 1940. He then emigrated to the United States and was appointed, in 1959, professor of microbiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In 1969, Salvador Luria was awarded the Nobel prize for medicine and physiology “for his discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and genetic structure of viruses”.

In the 1940’s, Luria and his co-recipient of the Nobel prize, Max Delbruck, conducted a series of experiments on bacteriophages, viruses that attack bacteria. The results of these experiments where an important contribution to the understanding of viral and bacterial genetics, and indicated that DNA was a decisive factor in heredity.

Luria’s later work demonstrated additional genetic processes connected with the transfer of hereditary material between various organisms, thus paving the way for the meteoric rise of genetics in the following decades.

Salvador Luria died in 1991.