Renato Dulbecco

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Renato Dulbecco (born February 22, 1914) is an Italian-born virologist.

He was born in Catanzaro (Southern Italy) from a Calabrese mother and a Ligurian father. He graduated from high school at 16, then moved to the University of Turin. Despite a strong interest for mathematics and physics, he decided to study medicine. At only 22, he graduated in morbid anatomy and pathology under the supervision of professor Giuseppe Levi. During these years he met Salvador Luria and Rita Levi-Montalcini, whose friendship and encouragement would later bring him to the USA. In 1936 he was called up for military service as a medical officer, and later (1938) discharged. In 1940 Italy entered World War II and Dulbecco was recalled and sent to the front in France and Russia, where he was wounded. After hospitalization and the collapse of Fascism, he joined the resistance against the German occupation.

After the war he resumed his work at Levi's laboratory, but soon he moved, together with Levi-Montalcini, to the USA, where, in Bloomington, Indiana, he worked with Salvador Luria on bacteriophages. In the summer of 1949 he moved to Caltech, joining Max Delbrück's group. There he started his studies about animal oncoviruses^[1]. In the late 1950s he took Howard Temin as a student, with whom, and together with David Baltimore, he would later share the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell". In 1962 he moved to the Salk Institute and then in 1972 to The Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now named the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute). In 1986 he was among the scientists who launched the Human Genome Project^[2][3][4]. In 1993 he moved back to Italy, where he is currently president of the Institute of Biomedical Technologies at C.N.R. (National Council of Research) in Milan.

Contents 1 Why was he awarded the Nobel Prize? 2 Dulbecco's law 3 References 4 External links

[edit] Why was he awarded the Nobel Prize?

Dulbecco and his group demonstrated that the infection of normal cells with certain types of viruses (oncoviruses) led to the incorporation of virus-derived genes into the host-cell genome, and that this event lead to the transformation (the acquisition of a tumor phenotype) of those cells. As demonstrated by Temin and Baltimore, who shared the Nobel Prize with Dulbecco, the transfer of viral genes to the cell is mediated by an enzyme called reverse transcriptase (or, more precisely, RNA-dependent DNA polymerase), which replicates the viral genome (in this case made of RNA) into DNA, which is later incorporated in the host genome.

Oncoviruses are the cause of some forms of human cancers. Dulbecco's study gave us the basis for precise understanding of the molecular mechanisms by which they propagate, thus allowing us to better fight them. Furthermore, the mechanisms of carcinogenesis mediated by oncoviruses closely resemble the process by which normal cells degenerate into cancer cells. Dulbecco's discoveries allowed us to better understand and fight cancer.

[edit] Dulbecco's law

Dulbecco's law is a rule of thumb in the sociology of science: "Credit for a scientific discovery generally goes to the most famous, not the first, discoverer". It is attributed to Renato Dulbecco, Nobel-Prize winning biologist.

Also called the "Matthew effect" or Matthew Principle, after New Testament Gospel of Matthew, 13:12: "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath."

That is, credit for a scientific discovery or other achievement goes to those already famous. For example, Newton is often credited for discoveries in mechanics more propertly credited to Euler, Robert Hooke, the Bernoullis, Gauss, LaGrange, D`Alembert, Poisson, Hamilton, Jacobi, etc. Similarly, Aristotle is often credited for the atomic hypothesis, actually developed by Democritus.

[edit] References

1. ^ Dulbecco R., From the molecular biology of oncogenic DNA viruses to cancer, Science. 1976 Apr 30;192(4238):437-40.
2. ^ Dulbecco R., A turning point in cancer research: Sequencing the genome, Science, 1986, 231: 1055-56.
3. ^ Lewin R., Proposal to sequence the human genome stirs debate., Science. 1986 Jun 27;232(4758):1598-600.
4. ^ Noll H., Sequencing the human genome, Science. 1986 Jul 11;233(4760):143.

[edit] External links

• Nobel autobiography
• Video of Renato Dulbecco at the Peoples Archive