Why the FBI tracked phage pioneer Salvador Luria

Abstract

The day before he won a share in the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, he talked to state legislators in Massachusetts, attended a peace convocation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and joined a protest against the Vietnam War. Luria shared the prize with Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey for research on bacteriophages, viruses that invade and often kill bacteria. Later research showed that these transient changes were due to bacterial restriction enzymes that target short strands of DNA.