Dulbecco, Renato

Dulbecco was an Italian-born American pioneer in molecular virology who showed how tumour viruses can transform normal cells into cancer-like cells. Dulbecco (1914–2012) invented the plaque assay technique to quantify the number of viral units in a laboratory culture, as well as an enriched synthetic medium suited for rapidly proliferating cell cultures, contributed to the development of polio vaccines in the early 1960s and discovered that the transformation into cancer cell after the infection of certain types of viruses (oncoviruses) was due to the incorporation of virus-derived genes into the host-cell genome. For his work, Dulbecco was awarded a shared Nobel Prize in medicine in 1975.