Nobel medicine laureate Renato Dulbecco dies at 97

PanARMENIAN.Net - Renato Dulbecco, an Italian-born biologist who won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his study on the role of viruses in altering DNA and causing cancer, died Monday, February 20 in La Jolla, California, two days before his 98th birthday, M&C reported citing DPA.

Dulbecco's death, apparently caused by a heart attack, was announced in Rome by the president of Italy's National Research Council (CNR), Luigi Nicolais, the ANSA news agency reported.

Dulbecco was a pioneer in revealing “how our individual response to medicines is written in our DNA,” said Giuseppe Novelli, a genetics professor at Rome's Tor Vergata university.

A naturalized US citizen, Dulbecco remained a well known figure in Italy, appearing in his later years on television shows to promote cancer research.

Dulbecco was born on February 22, 1914 in the southern Italian city of Catanzaro. But his father, who was a soldier, later moved the family to the northern Italian city of Turin, where the future Nobel Prize winner studied medicine and then became a researcher.

After serving as a medical officer in the Italian army during World War II, he joined partisans fighting against German occupation forces in Italy.

In 1947, Dulbecco left Italy for the United States where he began two years later working for the California Institute of Technology. It was there that his interest in the animal virus field began and where much of his research was conducted.

Following his Nobel Prize win, which he shared with two fellow-researchers - Howard Temin and David Baltimore - Dulbecco's interest shifted to the study of naturally occurring cancers.

He later became a faculty member of the La Jolla-based Salk Institute for Biological Studies, while also working for the CNR in Italy, where he had moved back in 1993.