Salvador E. Luria was born on 13 August 1912 in Turin, Italy. He received his M.D. at the University of Turin in 1935, later becoming a specialist in radiology in Rome. With the rise of fascism and anti-semitism in Italy, he left in 1938 for Paris, where he was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Radium until 1940.

At that time, as the Nazis invaded France, Luria left for the United States (later, in 1947, he became a U.S. citizen), for a position as Research Assistant in Surgical Bacteriology at Columbia University, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, where he remained until 1942. He worked during the summers with Max Delbrück in Cold Spring Harbor on bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacteria). When Delbrück went to Vanderbilt, Luria went with him as a Guggenheim fellow for one year. They continued their collaboration after Luria became an Instructor in Bacteriology at Indiana University in 1943.

Luria and Delbrück's work on bacteriophage demonstrated that bacteria resistant to certain phages arose through gene mutations. Later work by Luria showed that phages also mutate genetically. The existence of genetic recombination in phage was revealed independently by Delbrück and by Alfred D. Hershey, the latter subsequently showing that phages were composed of DNA. This work earned Luria, Delbrück, and Hershey the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969.

At Indiana University, Luria rose from Instructor to Assistant Professor (1945-1947) to Associate Professor of Bacteriology (1947-1950). One of his graduate students was James D. Watson; it was Luria who arranged for Watson to work at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he met Francis H.C. Crick.

In 1950, Luria became Professor of Bacteriology at the University of Illinois, where he remained until 1959. During this time, he also lectured in biophysics at the University of Colorado in 1950, was the Jesup Lecturer in Zoology at Columbia University in 1950, and was the Niewland Lecturer in Biology at the University of Notre Dame in 1959.

Luria became Professor of Microbiology and Chairman of the Microbiology Committee at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in 1959. In 1964, he was made Sedgwick Professor of Biology, and then in 1970, Institute Professor. In 1972, he founded the Center for Cancer Research at M.I.T., which he directed from 1972 to 1985.

Luria was affiliated with many professional organizations during his career at M.I.T. He was a Non-Resident Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, was on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Massachusetts General Hospital (1965-1968), was a member of the Committee on Personnel of the American Cancer Society (1966-1971), was on the boards of the Roche Institute for Molecular Biology (1972-1979) and the Basel Institute of Immunology (1977-1979), served as Chairman for the National Research Council's Board of Research on the Effects of Radiation, and was senior scientist for the Repligen Corporation.

Luria's strong political views prompted him to take a stand on many public issues, including civil defense, nuclear arms, the Middle East, and the United States' involvement in Vietnam and Central America. In 1969, he was blacklisted by the National Institutes of Health for his political activity, which included letter-writing campaigns and newspaper advertisements.

During Luria's career, he was involved with the editing of many scholarly journals. He was Editor of Virology, Associate Editor of Journal of Bacteriology, and Section Editor of Biological Abstracts, as well as being on the editorial boards of Experimental Cell Research, Journal of Molecular Biology, American Naturalist, Photochemistry and Photobiology, Annual Review of Genetics, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Luria was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Philosophical Society, the American Society for Microbiology (Vice President, 1966-1967; President, 1967-1968), the American Society of Biological Chemists, the American Society of Naturalists, the Genetics Society of America, the National Academy of Sciences, the Society for General Microbiology, and the Society for the Study of Development and Growth.

He received many honorary degrees, including those from Brown University, Indiana University, Providence College, Rockefeller University, Rutgers University, University of Chicago, and University of Palermo.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Luria received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 1969 with Max Delbrück for their work on the genetics of bacteria and bacteriophage. In 1974, Luria won a National Book Award in the Sciences for Life: The Unfinished Experiment, a work which has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. Other books that Luria published include General Virology; 36 Lectures in Biology; A View of Life; and an autobiographical work, A Slot Machine, A Broken Test Tube. He published numerous articles.

When Luria died on 6 February 1991 in Lexington, Massachusetts, he was Institute Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is survived by his wife, Zella Hurwitz Luria, a professor of psychology at Tufts University, and his son, Daniel David Luria, an economist.

The Salvador E. Luria Papers (1923-1992) contain correspondence, subject files, manuscripts of published and unpublished works by Luria, papers by colleagues and students, research notes by Luria and by students, course material, and photographs, which document Luria's career as a molecular biologist. The collection is mainly in English, but there are a few items in other languages, such as Italian and French. These latter folders are marked, for example, "Some in Italian" or "In Italian," as appropriate.

The papers (94 boxes; 48.25 linear feet) are divided into eight series:

Oversized materials follow the same series arrangement as the general collection. Cross-referencing to oversized material appears on the folders in the standard sized boxes. All photographs and negatives have been removed from Series I-V and placed in Series VII. Cross-references appear in the original series. Reprints have been moved to the printed materials collection of the APS library. If a reprint was found as an enclosure, a photocopy of the title page was filed in its place. To retrieve reprints, consult the card catalog for printed materials.

The last addition to the Luria Papers included thirteen 5.25" disks containing word processing files. These files were printed onto acid-free paper and incorporated into the collection. Since many of these files contained a date code which automatically generated the date of the document as the date of its printing, the correct date for the document (as determined from the disk directory) was written in pencil on the printed document.

Provenance

The Luria Papers were donated by Salvador E. Luria in 1985 (Accession 1985-575ms). After his death, additions were made to the collection by the estate of Salvador E. Luria in 1992 (Accession 1992-1176ms), in 1993 (Accession 1993-1542ms and Accession 1993-2043ms), and in 1994 (Accession 1994-636ms and Accession 1994-695ms). Most of the material from the 1950s came from Luria's office at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Preferred citation

Cite as: Salvador E. Luria Papers, American Philosophical Society.

Processing information

Catalogued by Miriam Spectre, November, 1994.

Separated material

Two cassette tapes were removed from the collection ("Adventures in the Gene Trade" and "Science, Technology, and Responsibility"), along with one sound track film reel ("The Nobel Prize in Medicine: A Meeting with Dr. Alfred D. Hershey, Prof. Max Delbrück, and Prof. Salvador E. Luria), and two sound tape reels ("How Does a Virus Work?" and "Science, Technology, and Responsibility"). To retrieve these items, consult the card catalog for manuscript materials.

Bibliography

Genetics Note

This collection contains materials which relate to the history of genetics.

• American Society for Microbiology
• Boston Area Faculty Group on Public Issues
• Fondation Royaumont
• International Cell Research Organization
• Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
• United States. National Institutes of Health

• Annual reports.
• Laboratory notebooks
• Laboratory notes
• Lantern slides
• Lectures
• Photoprints

• Adelberg, Edward A.
• Anderson, Thomas Foxen, 1911-1991
• Baltimore, David
• Borek, Ernest, 1911-1986
• Chomsky, Noam
• Chovnick, Arthur
• Clowes, Royston C.
• Cohen, Seymour S. (Seymour Stanley)
• Cohn, Melvin
• Crick, Francis, 1916-2004
• Davis, Bernard D., 1916-1994
• Delbrück, Max, 1906-1981
• Dobzhansky, Theodosius Grigorievich, 1900-1975
• Doermann, August H
• Gould, Stephen Jay, 1941-2002
• Gunsalus, I. C. (Irwin Clyde)
• Halvorson, Harlyn O.
• Hershey, A. D. (Alfred Day)
• Jacob, Francois, 1920-2013
• Lederberg, Joshua
• Luria, S. E. (Salvador Edward), 1912-1991
• Lwoff, André
• Magasanik, Boris
• McClintock, Barbara, 1902-1992
• Meselson, Matthew
• Monod, Jacques
• Novick, Aaron
• Pauling, Linus, 1901-1994
• Streisinger, George
• Watson, James D., 1928-
• Weigle, Jean
• Wiesel, Elie, 1928-

• Bacteriophages-Genetics
• Central America-Foreign relations-1979-
• Civil defense
• Microbial genetics
• Molecular biology
• Nobel Prizes
• Nuclear energy
• Nuclear weapons
• Political participation
• Vietnamese conflict, 1961-1975
• Viral genetics