August 13th
Born August 13, 1912; died February 6, 1991 at the age of 78.
Salvador Edward Luria was an Italian-American microbiologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969 for his discoveries concerning “the mechanism of replication and the genetic structure of viruses”. From around 1940, they had been studying bacteriophages, a type of virus that infects bacteria, rather than ordinary cells. These offered as simple a living system as possible for researching fundamental life processes, especially self-replication. Finally, they demonstrated the role of nucleic acid as a vector for the genetic information of the virus. Due to the short reproduction time, other information came from the bacteriophages faster than working with other viruses.
