Provided by U.S. National Library of Medicine - please see here for more information. · Public domain

Luria fled fascist Italy for the United States and went on to show, with the Luria-Delbrück fluctuation test, that bacteria's resistance to viruses is inherited rather than acquired in response to exposure — a foundational result for modern genetics. He shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey for working out how viruses replicate and pass on their genetic structure, research that helped establish molecular biology as a field in its own right.