Renato Dulbecco: A Renaissance Scientist

Renato Dulbecco died on February 19, 2012, three days shy of his 98th birthday. He had a remarkable career in science that spanned over 60 years. In 1948 he published, with Salvador Luria, his first real scientific paper in Genetics on bacteriophage genetics and in 2008 published his last paper in PNAS on breast cancer tumor-initiating cells. In the intervening years, Dulbecco helped to decipher how tumor viruses integrate into genomes and transform normal cells into cancer cells and propelled biology into the genomic era with his broad thinking and prescient foresight. Dulbecco was born in Cantanzaro in Southern Italy in 1914. He trained as a medical doctor, specializing in pathology, and received his degree from the University of Torino in 1936. After graduating, he served 2 years in the military, before returning to train in pathology. He then decided that he was more interested in basic research than medicine and began working on cell culture techniques with