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The Italian biologist Renato Dulbecco (1914-2012) had early success isolating a mutant of the polio virus which was used to create a life-saving vaccine. Later in his career, he initiated the Human Genome Project and was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975 for furthering our understanding of cancer caused by viruses. [Listener: Paola De Paoli Marchetti; date recorded: 2005]
TRANSCRIPT: Naturally, during university I had to study, I had to conduct research outside Levi's laboratory, because I had to write my thesis to pass my degree. And I decided not to write my thesis on normal anatomy, but on pathological anatomy, because pathological anatomy reflects diseases, while normal anatomy is the basis but... and this is why I became an intern at the Department of Pathological Anatomy in Turin and I worked... my thesis was on changes in liver parenchyma in diseases such as hepatic cirrhosis, the obstruction of the bile duct, in fact all these conditions. What emerged was really very interesting, for example looking at when there is a degenerative form, very often these degenerative forms are attributed to alcoholism, but now we know that they are not, it is not alcoholism, most of the time they are viruses, and what I was noting is that... you know the structure of the liver is made... there are round points, barrels with cells that are all converging towards the centre and blood from the intestine comes from outside, through it all and then ends up in the vein that leads to the general circulation, and the liver filters everything. And what I was noting when there were these degenerative forms, very often the degeneration was happening along the length of these barrels in the radius, in short, this was the path of the blood as it seemed, it suggested precisely that this was due to the fact that something toxic was in the blood coming from the intestine and this then altered the cells and then the cells went to these 'lesioni bivenose', as I called them and actually at that time this result did not make much of an impression, but this can be understood to be due to the fact that this virus came from the intestine and then attacked the cells and one after another the virus continued to reproduce itself but always in the direction of the blood, but this is just a summary.
