The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1969
Awarded on: 1969-10-16
"for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses"
Affiliations:
- California Institute of Technology (Caltech) – Pasadena, CA, USA
Max Delbrück
Born: 1906-09-04 in Berlin, Germany
Gender: male
Field: Biophysicist
Biography
Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück was a German–American biophysicist who participated in launching the molecular biology research program in the late 1930s. He stimulated physical scientists' interest into biology, especially as to basic research to physically explain genes, mysterious at the time. Formed in 1945 and led by Delbrück along with Salvador Luria and Alfred Hershey, the Phage Group made substantial headway unraveling important aspects of genetics. The three shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses". He was the first physicist to predict what is now called Delbrück scattering.