General Józef
Wybicki
Junior High School
Number 24 in Lodz
European citizens in
my city,
the citizens of my city in Europe.
Liceo Scientifico "Pitagora" Rende, Italy
Renato Dulbecco
He was born in Catanzaro in 1914 from a Calabrese
mother and a Ligurian father. His father, who was in “Genio Civile” was
sent first to Cuneo, after to Turin, after that to Imperia, where the
young boy attends the Liceo “De Amicis” and he spends most of his time
on the beach and in a small meterological observatory.
He went to the University in Turin. Although he liked especially physics
and mathematics, he decided to study medicine. Soon he realized to be
interested in biology more than in applied medicine and working with
Giuseppe Levi, professor of anatomy, he met two students who later had a
strong influence on his life: Salvator Luria and Rita Levi-Montalcini.
All through the student years he was at the top of his class although he
was two years younger than everybody else.
In 1936 he was called up for military service and in 1939 was recalled
because of the second world war. He was sent to the French front and a
year later to Russia, on the front of the Don, from where during a mayor
Russian offensive, he managed to escape and came back home. When
Mussolini's government collapsed he joined the Resistance and was part
of the "Committee for National Liberation" of the city of Turin, and
became a councillor of that city in the first post-war city council.
However, the life of routine politics was not for him and within months
he left that position to return to laboratory. After the war he
continued to study biology but he would like to work in genetics of some
organism, possibly using radiation. His dream became a reality after
Luria, who had been in the USA since the beginning of the war, and was
working in this very field, came in the summer of 1946 to Turin. He
encouraged him and offered him a small salary for working in his group.
He went to work with Luria in Bloomington, Indiana, where he made some
good pieces of work, attracting the interest of Max Delbruk, who brought
him in California, at Caltech in 1949.
He was fascinated by the beauty and immensity of the USA and soon he
became professor.
Then he started to be interested in the tumour virus fields and decided
to work on an oncogenic virus, polyoma virus. So, in 1962 he moved from
Caltech to the Salk Institute, and in the 1972 to the Imperial Cancer
Research Fund Laboratories in London.
In 1975, thanks to his discoveries in subject of iterations among virus
tumour and material genetic of the cell, he received the Nobel Prize for
the medicine together with David Baltimore and Howard Temin.
Since 1986 he suggested the starting of the Genome Project to identify
every cell types and their roles.
In 1999 he introduced Sanremo’s festival together with Fabio Fazio and
Laetitia Casta.
Besides the Nobel prize, Dulbecco received “laurea honoris causa” in
sciences at the University of Yale, and he belongs to the academy of the
Linceis, to the American National academy of the Sciences and he is
foreign member of the Royal English Society.