Renato Dulbecco(1914-2012)

摘要

Renato Dulbecco, a giant of cancer biology, passed away peacefully on 19 February, just three days shy of his 98th birthday. Through a decade-long series of experiments that began in the late 1950s - first at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena and then at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California - he and his co-workers demonstrated that the behaviour of cancer cells could be traced directly to acquired genes. Some viruses can integrate their genomes into host cell DNA, inducing uncontrolled cell growth - the hallmark of a cancer cell. For these early clues to the genetic origins of cancer, Dulbecco shared the 1975 Nobel prize with the late Howard Temin, his former student, and with David Baltimore, my former mentor.