Max Delbrück

Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück (September 4, 1906 – March 9, 1981) was a German-American biophysicist and Nobel laureate.

Max Delbrück
Delbrück in the early 1940s
Born	Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück (1906-09-04)September 4, 1906 Berlin, German Empire
Died	March 9, 1981(1981-03-09) (aged 74) Pasadena, California, United States
Citizenship	United States[1]
Alma mater	University of Göttingen
Known for	"discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses" (Nobel Committee)[2] Saffman–Delbrück model
Awards	ForMemRS (1967)[3] Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1969) EMBO Membership (1970)[4]
Scientific career
Fields	Biophysics
Institutions	Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry Vanderbilt University Caltech

Delbrück was one of the most influential people in the movement of physical scientists into biology during the 20th century.

Delbrück's big idea was to explore genetics by means of the bacteriophage viruses which infect bacteria. This was important in the early development of molecular biology.

Biography

Delbrück was born in Berlin, German Empire. Trained as a physicist, he got his Ph.D. in 1930. he traveled through England, Denmark, and Switzerland. He met Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr, who got him interested in biology.

In 1937, he moved to the United States to pursue his interests in biology, taking up research in the Biology Division at Caltech on genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. While at Caltech Delbrück became acquainted with bacteria and their viruses (bacteriophage or 'phage').

Delbrück remained in the US during World War II, teaching physics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville while pursuing his genetic research. In 1942, he and Salvador Luria of Indiana University demonstrated that bacterial resistance to virus infection is caused by random mutation and not adaptive change. This research, known as the Luria-Delbrück experiment, was also significant for its use of mathematics to make quantitative predictions for the results to be expected from alternative models. For that work, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, sharing it with Alfred Hershey.^[5]

During the 1940s Delbrück developed a course in bacteriophage genetics at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to encourage interest in the field. In 1947, Delbrück returned to Caltech as a professor of biology where he remained until 1977.

References

1. "Max Delbrück". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved June 25, 2013. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Delbrück went to the United States in 1937, serving as a faculty member of the California Institute of Technology (1937–39; 1947–81) and of Vanderbilt University (1940–47). He became a U.S. citizen in 1945.
2. "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1969". Nobel Foundation. Archived from the original on June 25, 2013. Retrieved June 25, 2013.
3. William Hayes (1982). "Max Ludwig Henning Delbruck. 4 September 1906-10 March 1981". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 28. London: Royal Society: 58–90. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1982.0003. JSTOR 769892. S2CID 73351038.
4. "Max Delbrück EMBO profile". people.embo.org. Heidelberg: European Molecular Biology Organization.^{[permanent dead link]}
5. Lagemann, Robert T. 2000. "Max Delbrück at Vanderbilt" in To quarks and quasars: a history of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt University. 165-193