Max Delbrück
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Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück (September 4, 1906 – March 9, 1981) was a German-American biophysicist and Nobel laureate.
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[edit] Biography
Max Delbrück was born in Berlin, Germany. His father was Hans Delbrück, a professor of history at the University of Berlin, and his mother was the granddaughter of Justus von Liebig.
Delbrück studied astrophysics, shifting towards theoretical physics, at the University of Göttingen. After receiving 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. Delbrück went back to Berlin in 1932 as an assistant to Lise Meitner.
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'). In 1939, he co-authored a paper called The Growth of Bacteriophage with E.L. Ellis in which they demonstrated that viruses reproduce in "one step", rather than exponentially as cellular organisms do.
In 1941, he married Mary Bruce, with whom he had four children. Delbrück's brother Justus Delbrück, a lawyer, his sister Emmi Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law Klaus Bonhoeffer (brother of the theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer) were in the German Resistance against the Nazi Regime. Klaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were executed in the last days of Hitler's Germany.
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 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.[1]
From the 1950s on, Delbrück applied biophysical methods to problems in sensory physiology rather than genetics. He also set up the institute for molecular genetics at the University of Cologne.
Delbrück was one of the most influential people in the movement of physical scientists into biology during the 20th century. Delbrück's thinking about the physical basis of life stimulated Erwin Schrödinger to write the highly influential book, What Is Life?[2]. Schrödinger's book was an important influence on Francis Crick, James D. Watson and Maurice Wilkins who won a Nobel prize for the discovery of the DNA double helix[3]. During the 1940s Delbrück developed a course in bacteriophage genetics at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to encourage interest in the field. Delbrück's efforts to promote the "Phage Group" (exploring genetics by way of the viruses that infect bacteria) was important in the early development of molecular biology.
[edit] Discovery of the DNA Double Helix
| Max Delbrück Discovery of the DNA Double Helix |
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|---|---|
 Diagram of a bacteriophage. |
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| William Astbury | Oswald Avery |
| Francis Crick | Erwin Chargaff |
| Max Delbrück | Jerry Donohue |
| Rosalind Franklin | Phoebus Levene |
| Linus Pauling | Alec Stokes |
| James Watson | Maurice Wilkins |
[edit] References
- ^ Lagemann, Robert T. "Max Delbrück at Vanderbilt" in To Quarks and Quasars, A History of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University, 2000. pp. 165-193.
- ^ See: "Erwin Schrödinger and the Origins of Molecular Biology" by Krishna R. Dronamrajua in Genetics (1999) Volume 153 page 1071-1076. full text
- ^ Schrödinger's influence and role in the discovery of the structure of DNA is described by Horace Freeland Judson in The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press (1996) ISBN 0879694785.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Nobel prize webpage
- Delbrück page at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory website.
- Letter from Jim Watson Delbrück was instrumental in getting fellowship support for Watson so that he could stay in Cambridge, play tennis, and discover the rules of nucleotide base pairing in DNA. This is a letter from Watson to Delbrück that describes the discovery.
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1951: Theiler | 1952: Waksman | 1953: Krebs, Lipmann | 1954: Enders, Weller, Robbins | 1955: Theorell | 1956: Cournand, Forssmann, Richards | 1957: Bovet | 1958: Beadle, Tatum, Lederberg | 1959: Ochoa, Kornberg | 1960: Burnet, Medawar | 1961: Békésy | 1962: Crick, Watson, Wilkins | 1963: Eccles, Hodgkin, Huxley | 1964: Bloch, Lynen | 1965: Jacob, Lwoff, Monod | 1966: Rous, Huggins | 1967: Granit, Hartline, Wald | 1968: Holley, Khorana, Nirenberg | 1969: Delbrück, Hershey, Luria | 1970: Katz, Euler, Axelrod | 1971: Sutherland | 1972: Edelman, Porter | 1973: Frisch, Lorenz, Tinbergen | 1974: Claude, Duve, Palade | 1975: Baltimore, Dulbecco, Temin |
