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A 97 anni compiuti è morto oggi a La Jolla in California Renato Dulbecco il biologo e genetista italiano vincitore del premio Nobel per la medicina nel 1975. Mancavano due giorni al 98esimo compleanno.
Non mancano i siti che ne ripercorrono la carriera e le gesta. E così voglio ricordarlo con due momenti, collegati: la motivazione del Premio Nobel conferitogli per i suoi studi su "the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell" e l'autobiografia che lo stesso Dulbecco scrisse per il Karolinska Institutet.
KAROLINSKA INSTITUTETOctober 1975Karolinska institutet has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1975 jointly to
David Baltimore, Renato Dulbecco and Howard Temin
for their discoveries concerning "the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell".
The fact that the viruses can cause tumours was shown already more than 60 years ago byRous in studies of sarcomas and leukemias in chickens. However this observation was for a long time regarded as a biological curiosity and not until during the 1950ies was it shown that under certain conditions viruses could cause leukemias and other tumours also in other animals, e.g. mice. Studies of virus-induced changes of the growth characteristics of a normal cell to that of tumour cells - a phenomenon referred to as transformation - was facilitated during this decade due to the availability of methods for cultivating cells under laboratory conditions. This technique combined with the discovery of several viruses which could cause transformation in animals and in cell cultures provided facilities for studies of the role of the virus in this process. It was found that both viruses which contain genetic material of the same type as that present in chromosomes of cells i.e. deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and also viruses containing a different type of genetic material, ribonucleic acid (RNA) could cause transformation.
