In 1938, Luria left fascist Italy to work at Institut du Radium in Paris. He fled Paris by bicycle just ahead of the advancing Germans in June 1940. After receiving an immigration visa for the US in Marseille, Luria reached New York in September 1940 where, Fermi, who had preceded him to the US, helped Luria obtain a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and become a research assistant at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. A Guggenheim fellowship allowed him to spend 1942 at Vanderbilt University working with Delbrück. In 1943, Luria became an instructor at Indiana University, where he remained until 1950, when he moved to the University of Illinois in Urbana as professor of microbiology. In 1959, after a sabbatical year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Luria was appointed chair of MIT’s newly-formed microbiology department. Named Sedgwick Professor of Biology in 1964 and founding director of the Center for Cancer Research in 1972, Luria remained at MIT until his retirement in 1985, becoming Institute Professor of Biology Emeritus.
Known for his political activism, Luria was denied a passport in 1953 to deliver a paper at a scientific meeting in Oxford, England. James Watson, Luria’s first graduate student at Indiana University, delivered the paper in his absence. Later, Luria publicly opposed US involvement in the Vietnam War, serving as a leader of the highly visible anti-war Boston Area Faculty Group on Public Issues. Within days of winning the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey “for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses”, Luria learned that his name appeared on a National Institutes of Health funding blacklist. The ban was ultimately rescinded or ignored. Luria secured National Cancer Institute funding in 1972 for the MIT Center for Cancer Research.
Luria was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959 and was named a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1960. In 1964, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. From 1968 to 1969, he served as president of the American Society for Microbiology. In 1969, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Max Delbrück. He received the National Medal of Science in 1991.
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