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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: I remember that Max said that this was a very important result and we had to... there was a meeting of the Science Academy, he said, 'We'll go there and you can present the figures at this meeting'. And that's what we did and I remember that at the end of it, we were there alone talking with... there was a Nobel Prize winner who carried out work on plant viruses, I don't remember his name, and he was congratulating me and said, 'I think that was the most important talk of the day'.
[PDPM] Of the day!
Yes, in fact this and having this method I started to use it to study the characteristics of these viruses. In the meantime, this was the period when everyone was terrified about polio and particularly in the United States, there was real terror and people were not sending their children to school for fear of it. Naturally, swimming pools, etc. were not talked about. When this issue came up, it was seen that there was an organisation that collected funds to fight polio, and the secretary of this organisation came to me one day and said, 'Listen, we need you to develop this plaque method for polio', and I said, 'Okay. Let's do something. I'll need to check with the institute, at Caltech to see if they'll allow me to do this', because it was an infectious virus. They thought about it and recognised the importance of it, but they didn't want me to work within the institute, so they set up a small laboratory for me, an isolated room and we went to work there.
[PDPM] Because it was very dangerous to work with an active virus.
Well, yes, sure, it's understandable. And we worked there and we saw that it wasn't difficult after all, that we just needed special cells, not those of mice, but cells from monkeys, because we needed to have, we needed the kidney of a monkey and this was very difficult, but they had their means, contacts, etc. so they provided these cells and we saw that it could be done. The only difference was that these plaques developed much more slowly, the virus was not as aggressive, they moved slowly and so we published a paper. This was also a starting point; it was very important, I think, for the virus, for the Sabin vaccine, because I had showed that if you take the material the virus present in a plaque, this virus is a pure stock of virus, while those that were used normally are of various mixed quality, so that if one wanted to obtain a vaccine, that is a mitigated virus that grows, produces immunity, but does not infect, does not cause harm, such as the Sabin vaccine, you need to have such means as these, and I put it right. I showed it to Sabin. I don't know how much Sabin used, but I think that he used it at least in crucial points of his system. And then we also saw that certain stocks of the virus produce plaques, different characteristics, which also helped to isolate different 'strains', so it was something that also had wonderful practical repercussions.
