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Max Delbruck was born in Berlin, Germeny on September 4, 1906. His father, Hans Delbrück, Professor of History at the University of Berlin, was editor and columnist of the Preussische Jahrbücher. His mother was a granddaughter of the chemist, Justus von Liebig.
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He was the brother of two boys and four girls.
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Delbrück studied astrophysics, then going to theoretical physics, at the University of Göttingen. After getting his Ph.D. in 1930, he traveled through England, Denmark, and Switzerland. He met Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr, who got him interested in biology.
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he traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he worked with Niels Bohr, the theorist who proposed the model of the atom
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Delbrück went back to Berlin in 1932 as an assistant to Lise Meitner, who was working with with Otto Hahn on the results of irradiating uranium with neutrons.
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In the United States, he studied biology and genetics at the California Institute of Technology. He then met Emory Ellis.
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Along with Emory Ellis, Delbrück developed experimental methods to investigate bacteriophages and mathematical systems to see the results of the experiments. He then published them.
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Together, Delbrück and Luria published their work in 1943. They showed the first evidence that bacterial heredity is controlled by genes.
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Delbrück and Hershey demonstrated that genetic material from different viruses could be combined to make a virus different from each other
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Delbrück 's casual manner and brains gave a relaxed feeling, and his laboratory became a meeting place for many molecular biologists working on problems in genetics.
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Max Delbruck dies of natural causes in Pasadena, California.
