Max Delbrück

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Not to be confused with his uncle, Max Delbrück (1850-1919), an agricultural chemist.
Max Delbrück
Max Delbruck.jpg
Delbrück in the early 1940s
Born Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück
(1906-09-04)September 4, 1906
Berlin, German Empire
Died March 9, 1981(1981-03-09) (aged 74)
Pasadena, California, United States
Fields Biophysics
Known for Phage group
Notable awards

Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück, ForMemRS[1] (September 4, 1906 – March 9, 1981) was a German–American biophysicist. He won the Nobel prize for discovering that bacteria become resistant to viruses (phages) as a result of genetic mutations.

Contents

Early and personal life [edit]

Delbrück was born in Berlin, German Empire. His father was Hans Delbrück, a professor of history at the University of Berlin, and his mother was the granddaughter of Justus von Liebig, eminent chemist.

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 brothers-in-law Klaus Bonhoeffer and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, both executed in the final days of Hitler's Germany, participated in the German Resistance against the Nazi Regime.

Education and early career [edit]

Delbrück studied astrophysics, shifting towards theoretical physics, at the University of Göttingen. Having earned a Ph.D. in 1930, he traveled through England, Denmark, and Switzerland. He met Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr, who interested him in biology.

Delbrück returned to Berlin in 1932 as an assistant to Lise Meitner, who was collaborating with Otto Hahn on irradiation of uranium with neutrons. Delbrück wrote a few papers, including one in 1933 on gamma rays' scattering by a Coulomb field's polarization of a vacuum. His conclusion was theoretically sound but inapplicable to the case in point, though 20 years later Hans Bethe confirmed the phenomenon and named it "Delbrück scattering".[2]

In 1937, he attained a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to research genetics of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, in California Institute of Technology's biology department.[3] While at Caltech, Delbrück researched bacteria and their viruses (bacteriophages or phages). In 1939, with E.L. Ellis, he co-authored a paper, "The growth of bacteriophage", reporting that the viruses reproduce in one step, not exponentially as do cellular organisms.

Role in biology research [edit]

Delbrück remained in the US during World War II (1939–45), teaching physics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, while continuing genetic research. In 1942, he and Salvador Luria of Indiana University demonstrated that bacterial resistance to virus infection is mediated by random mutation. This research, known as the Luria-Delbrück experiment, notably applied mathematics to make quantitative predictions, and earned them the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Alfred Hershey.[4] Also that year, Delbrück and Luria were awarded by Columbia University the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize.

In 1945, Delbrück developed a course in bacteriophage genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, New York. Delbrück's promotion of this "Phage Group"—which explored genetics through researches on bacterial viruses—spurred molecular biology's early development.[5] In 1947, Delbrück returned to Caltech as a professor of biology. From the 1950s on, he applied biophysical methods to problems in sensory physiology rather than to genetics. Meanwhile, he set up University of Cologne's institute for molecular genetics.

Later life and legacy [edit]

Drawing of a plaque in Buttrick Hall, Vanderbilt University commemorating the work of Max Delbrück.[6]

Delbrück was influential in the 20th century's movement of physical scientists into biology. His inferences on genes' susceptibility to mutation was relied on by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in his 1944 book What Is Life?,[7] which conjectured genes were an "aperiodic crystal" storing codescript and influenced Francis Crick and James D. Watson in their 1953 identification of cellular DNA's molecular structure as a double helix.[8][9] In 1977, he retired from Caltech, yet remained Professor of Biology emeritus.

Max Delbrück died, at age 74, on the evening of Monday, 9 March 1981, at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California. On 26 to 27 August 2006—the year Delbrück would have turned 100—family and friends gathered at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to reminisce on his life and work.[10] Although Delbrück supported research reductionism, he conjectured that ultimately a paradox—akin perhaps to the waveparticle duality of physics—would be revealed about life.[11]

See also [edit]

References [edit]

  1. ^ a b Hayes, W. (1982). "Max Ludwig Henning Delbruck. 4 September 1906-10 March 1981". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 28: 58–26. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1982.0003. JSTOR 769892. PMID 11639973.  edit
  2. ^ Hayes W. Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück—September 4, 1906-March 10, 1981. Biogr Mem Natl Acad Sci. 1992;62:67-117.
  3. ^ "MDC celebrates centennial of Max Delbrück". Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine Berli-Buch. 4 Sep 2006.
  4. ^ Lagemann RT. "Max Delbrück at Vanderbilt", pp 165-93, in Lagemann RT & Holladay WG, To Quarks and Quasars: A History of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University (Vanderbilt University Dept Physics & Astronomy, 2000).
  5. ^ Watson JD. "James D. Watson: Chancellor emeritus". Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. 2012.
  6. ^ Max Delbrück and the Next 100 Years of Biology: The Max Delbrück Vanderbilt Centenary Celebration, The Inaugural Vanderbilt Discovery Lecture, Held September 14, 2006
  7. ^ Dronamraju KR. "Erwin Schrödinger and the origins of molecular biology". Genetics. 1999 Nov;153(3):1071-6.
  8. ^ Murphy MP & O'Neill LAJ. What Is Life? the Next Fifty Years: Speculations on the Future of Biology (Cambridge University Press, 1997). p 2.
  9. ^ Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1996), ISBN 0-87969-478-5.
  10. ^ Haslinger, Kiryn. Max Delbruck 100. HT Winter 2007.
  11. ^ Horowitz NH. "Review of Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology". Biophys J. 1994 Mar;66(3 Pt 1):929–30.

External links [edit]

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