Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
Memorial Service Planned For Professor S.E. Luria Institute Professor Emeritus Salvador E. Luria, a pioneer in molecular biology who shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology, died February 6 at his home in Lexington, at the age of 78 after suffering a heart attack. Funeral arrangements were private. A memorial service will be held at MIT at a date to be announced. Professor Luria, a physician and scientist, was internationally known for his research in the fields of virology and genetics. He was the first to discover the phenomenon of virus host restriction in bacteria and this work led to the discovery of "restriction" enzymes which formed the basis of modern recombinant DNA technology. In 1969 he shared the Nobel Prize with Dr. Max Delbruck of the California Institute of Technology and Dr. Alfred D. Hershey of the Carnegie Institute of Washington. Their basic research on viruses is regarded as being primarily responsible for modern advances in the control of viral diseases and for advances in molecular biology. Dr. Luria and Dr. Delbruck also received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 1969 for their work on genetics of bacteria and bacteriophage, which led to the birth of what became known as "the phage group," phage being the shortened form of bacteriophage, the type of virus the research involved. The phage group formed the core of what later became molecular biology in the United States. Professor Luria was a member of the MIT faculty in the Department of Biology from 1959 until his death. When he joined MIT he organized a new teaching and research program in the field of microbiology and later founded the MIT Center for Cancer Research, which he directed from 1972- 1985. In 1970, in recognition of his important contributions to his field, to society and to MIT, he was named Institute Professor, an honor MIT bestows on very few of its faculty. Professor Luria was a visible and vocal member of the peace movement and was identified with efforts to keep science humanistic. For example, in 1985, at the 21st Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, he said that scientists who "exile themselves from the arena of social struggles" are failing the societies in which they work. Scientists who shirk their responsibilities to society, he said, stand "somewhere between that of philosophers and poets on the one hand, and that of handgun manufacturers on the other hand." A Time Magazine profile published in 1985 described Professor Luria this way: "Born in 1912 into a distinguished 500-year-old family of Northern Italian Jews, he determined to exercise vigorously the intellectual freedom of his new (1947) American citizenship. After fleeing fascism in Italy in 1938, he left Paris for the US two years later and applied his genius for molecular biology to the genetics of bacteria." Professor Luria told Time Magazine for that article: "I made up my mind that as a citizen I would be an active participant in American politics, taking advantage of the democratic opportunities that were not available to me in Italy. What scientific achievement I have reached is due to the freedom provided in this wealthy country to all aspects of intellectual enterprise." He urged his students to form a strong world view and for some time taught a course in world literature to graduate students at MIT and to medical students at Harvard Medical School to insure their involvement in matters outside science. He was deeply interested in the arts and one of his hobbies was sculpting. He took sculpting lessons in Paris in 1963 while on a fellowship and preferred to work in the abstract school. In 1974 he won the National Book Award in the Sciences for his first nonacademic book, Life: The Unfinished Experiment, which was translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese. Professor Luria was born in Turin, Italy, August 13, 1912. He received the MD degree summa cum laude, from the University of Turin in 1935. He went on to become a specialist in radiology at the University of Rome. When the political situation in Italy worsened, Dr. Luria went to Paris in 1938 to become a research fellow at the Institut du Radium. Immigrating to the US in 1940, Dr. Luria continued to do research at Columbia University until 1942. A Guggenheim Fellowship then made it possible for him to work at Vanderbilt and Princeton Universities. From 1943 to 1959, Professor Luria taught at Indiana University. One of his graduate students there was James D. Watson, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 for the discovery of the structure of DNA. In 1950 Professor Luria lectured in biophysics at the University of Colorado and was a Jessup Lecturer in zoology at Columbia University. In that year he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois as professor of bacteriology. In 1959, he was Nieuwland Lecturer in biology at Notre Dame University. At the time of his death he was senior scientist at Repligen Corp., a biotechnology firm in Cambridge, a position he had held since 1984. Dr. Luria was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Society for Microbiology (vice president, 1966-67, President, 1967-68), the American Society of Biological Chemists, the Society for General Microbiology, the Genetics Society, the American Naturalists, and the Society for the Study of Development and Growth. He received honorary doctor of science degrees from the University of Chicago (1969), Indiana University (1970), Rutgers University (1970), Providence College (1972), Brown University (1973) and the University of Palermo (1973). Surviving are his wife, Zella (Hurwitz) Luria, a professor of psychology at Tufts University, Medford, Mass., and a son, Daniel, an economist. Contributions in Dr. Luria's memory may be made to one of the following: American Friends Service Committee, Peace Education Division, 2161 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Mass. 02140; Resource Center for Non- Violence, 515 Broadway, Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060; Children's Defense Fund, 122 C St., NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20001.