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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: [PDPM] After all the paths you have taken through your discoveries, then came the Nobel Prize, and this was another path. You said that the Nobel changed your life, but in what sense exactly did it change your life? Did it give you more humanity and subtract something from your science or did you continue at the same pace?
No, sure, from the science viewpoint, the Nobel changed me, because, as I was saying yesterday, when I received the Nobel Prize, I thought that what I had done up to that time was... I had worked on cancer but it was work that was very general in nature, cancer and genes, the value of genes, in short, without concentrating on anything specific, especially without focussing on aspects of the disease, on cancer as a human disease. And this is why I then thought about starting to work on breast cancer, for the reasons that I explained yesterday and this was precisely the outcome of receiving the Nobel Prize. If I hadn't received the Nobel Prize, I don't think I would have taken this path, I would have continued to work in the directions I was focussing on up to then. In short, there is generally a reason for everything, because, as I was also explaining yesterday, anyway...
