(1912-1991) Italian-born US physician who was a pioneer in molecular biology, especially the genetic structure of viruses. Luria was a pacifist and was identified with efforts to keep science humanistic. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine 1969.
/> Luria was born in Turin. He left Fascist Italy 1938, going first to France, where he became a research fellow at the Institut du Radium in Paris, and then to the US 1940. From 1943 he taught at a number of universities and in 1959 became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He founded the MIT Center for Cancer Research, which he directed 1972–85. For some time he taught a course in world literature to graduate students at MIT and at Harvard Medical School to ensure their involvement in the arts.