Salvador Luria (1912)

Luria was an Italian biologist who began his career in Paris studying the effects of radiation on bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria. After immigrating to the US during World War II, he started using bacteriophages to study such fundamental life processes as self-replication and mutation, along with Alfred Hershey and Max Delbrück. For their efforts, the three biologists shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in physiology. What famous scientific breakthrough came from one of Luria's students? More...

He worked at Indiana University where his first graduate student was James D. Watson, who went on to discover the structure of DNA with Francis Crick...

Happy us for your birthday Signore Salvatore Edoardo Luria!!!

A Nobel Prize-winning biologist and a political activist, Salvador Luria founded MIT’s Center for Cancer Research.

Outside the scientific and political fray, Luria enjoyed poetry and literature. His autobiography is sprinkled with quotations from the likes of T. S. Eliot and William Blake, and for five years he and his wife, Zella, a psychologist, ran an informal literature seminar for MIT biology graduate students in their home, studying works by Dante, Voltaire, and Kafka and the Bhagavad Gita. Luria later hosted a similar seminar with biology professor Frank Solomon. Hong Ma, PhD ‘88, now a professor at Fudan and Penn State universities, reflects that in his native China, “literary discussions focused on understanding the opinions of experts.” When he took part in the workshop with Luria and Solomon, he found it eye-opening that “everyone can comment on the author or the work, without being criticized as being ‘wrong.’”

“I made up my mind that as a citizen, I would be an active participant in American politics, taking advantage of the democratic opportunities that were not available to me in Italy,” he told Time magazine in 1985, six years before his death. “What scientific achievement I have reached is due to the freedom provided in this wealthy country to all aspects of intellectual enterprise.
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http://www.technologyreview.com/article/425097/the-free-thinker/