born Feb. 22, 1914, Catanzaro, Italy
Italian-born U.S. virologist.
He received his M.D. from the University of Turin in 1936 and immigrated to the U.S. in 1947. With Marguerite Vogt he pioneered the culturing of animal viruses and investigated how certain viruses gain control of the cells they infect. They showed that polyoma virus inserts its DNA into the DNA of the host cell and that the cell is then transformed into a cancer cell, reproducing the viral DNA along with its own and producing more cancer cells. Dulbecco suggested that human cancers could be caused by similar reproduction of foreign DNA fragments. He shared a 1975 Nobel Prize with two former students, Howard Temin (b. 1934) and David Baltimore . The last of his academic appointments in the U.S. and Britain was as president of the Salk Institute.