MicrobeWorld

For the second time in a week I note the passing of an important virologist. Renato Dulbecco, together with David Baltimore and Howard Temin, received the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries about how tumor viruses interact with the genetic material of the cell. Dulbecco also devised my favorite virological method, the plaque assay, for determining the virus titer, the number of animal viruses in a sample.