Salvador Luria

Salvador Luria

Salvador Edward Luria (Turin, August 13, 1912 – Lexington, Massachusetts, February 6, 1991) was an American microbiologist of Italian descent. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, with Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey, for showing that bacterial resistance to viruses (phages) is genetically inherited. He found that bacterial resistance was caused by restriction enzymes, which cut viral DNA at sequences that are specific to viruses and not found in the bacteria.