Luria, Salvador Edward (1912–1991)

Italian-born US physician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1969 for his work on the replication mechanism and genetic structure of viruses. Luria was a pacifist and was identified with efforts to keep science humanistic.

Luria was born in Turin. He left fascist Italy in 1938, going first to France, where he became a research fellow at the Institut du Radium in Paris, and then to the USA in 1940. From 1943 he taught at a number of universities and in 1959 became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He founded the MIT Center for Cancer Research, which he directed in the period 1972–85. For some time he taught a course in world literature to graduate students at MIT and at Harvard Medical School to ensure their involvement in the arts.