A Nobel Threesome

Dr. Salvador Luria, 57, washing the breakfast dishes in Lexington, Mass., was incredulous when a neighbor interrupted to report what he had just heard over the radio. Dr. Alfred Hershey, 60, also was skeptical when word reached him at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. Dr. Max Delbrueck, 63, was disgruntled; it was only 5 a.m. in Pasadena when a reporter called him. Telegrams from Stockholm soon confirmed the news. The three biologists (only Luria is an M.D.) had been jointly awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for their work between 1940 and 1952 in microbiology and genetics. The three will divide equally the award of $73,000.

All three of the biologists were honored for their experiments with bacteriophages, a group of viruses that infect bacteria. Scientists had long known that after it invades a bacterial cell, a virus multiplies rapidly into such great numbers that the cell bursts, releasing a host of identical viruses that seek out and enter other cells, where the process is repeated. By studying these viruses, researchers hoped to learn how more complex forms of life reproduce and pass on hereditary traits.

Coat of Protein. Delbruck, who was born in Germany, and Luria, from Italy, met at Vanderbilt University in 1940 and began to cooperate in their studies of bacteriophages. Luria soon discovered that mutations (a variation in characteristics from one generation to the next) occurred in the viruses, and that these changes were passed on to succeeding generations. Delbrueck found that the genetic materials of different kinds of viruses infecting the same cell sometimes combined, producing a new and different kind of virus.

Michigan-born Hershey, who began exchanging information with Delbruck and Luria in 1942, found more conclusive evidence for the genetic recombination that Delbrueck had discovered. In 1952, Hershey proved that the virus, which consists simply of nucleic acid (DNA) surrounded by a coat of protein, leaves its coat behind as it invades a cell. So it must be the DNA that contains the genetic information.

These and other discoveries led scientists to concentrate on the structure of the DNA molecule. The finding in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick that the typical DNA molecule consists of a double helix enabled scientists to reduce to relatively simple chemical terms the process by which inherited traits are passed on. But it was the contributions of Delbruck, Luria and Hershey that, in the words of the Nobel committee "set the solid foundation on which modern molecular biology rests."

The three winners are still actively engaged in research, Delbruck at the California Institute of Technology, Luria at M.I.T. and Hershey at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's genetic-research unit at Cold Spring Harbor. Only a fortnight ago, when the three met and compared notes, none had any idea of the honor that the next week would bring.

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