A Founding Fellow at the Salk Institute, Renato Dulbecco has made fundamental contributions to understanding the uncontrolled growth of cells that occurs in cancer. Dulbecco, a native of Catanzaro, Italy, received his M.D. from the University of Turin in 1936; in 1947, following World War II, he came to the United States, initially to Indiana University, where he worked on bateriophages. Two years later, he moved to the California Institute of Technology; there he started work on animal oncoviruses. In 1963, he joined the nascent Salk Institute.

Dulbecco's studies of viruses that cause disease led him to develop a method, used universally since then, to assess their activity. While working on viruses that cause tumors in animals, he developed what is now a widely used technique to study their effects using cells grown in laboratory containers. Best-known of Dulbecco's discoveries is that tumor viruses cause cancer by inserting their own genes into the chromosomes of infected cells—a finding that was one of the first clues to the genetic nature of cancer and led to his Nobel Prize in 1975. Dulbecco's study provided a basis for precise understanding of the molecular mechanisms by which cancer cells propagate.

Dulbecco subsequently turned to a study of the origins and progression of tumors of the breast, using monoclonal antibodies, which can identify cells by their chemical signatures, to characterize the tumor cells.

In 1972, he moved on to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London (now the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute), where he served as deputy director of research until 1977, when he returned to the Salk Institute as a distinguished research professor. He served as president of the Institute from 1988-93.

In 1986, Dulbecco initiated the idea of studying all human genes, helping to launch the worldwide Human Genome Project. Currently, he studies the genes that are important in the normal development of the breast and in the tumors that arise in it.

The recipient of numerous honors in addition to the Nobel Prize, including the 1964 Lasker Award, Dulbecco is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, and the Academia dei Lincei of Italy.