From medicine to virology
Dulbecco received his medical degree at Turin in 1936 and learned histology and cell culture in Giuseppe Levi’s laboratory. After the Second World War he moved to the United States to study bacteriophages with Salvador Luria, joining Caltech in 1949.
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Quantitative animal-virus experiments
He developed plaque-assay methods using cultured cells, allowing animal-virus infectivity to be measured quantitatively. He later investigated DNA tumour viruses including polyoma virus and SV40. His team demonstrated the integration of viral genetic material into that of transformed cells.
Institutions and genome research
Dulbecco moved to the Salk Institute in 1962 and later worked on cancer research in London. He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize with David Baltimore and Howard Temin. During the 1980s he advocated large-scale human-genome sequencing and led the Salk Institute from 1988 to 1992.