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His birth
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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The life of Max Delbruck
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Childhood
He was the brother of two boys and four girls. -
College
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. -
He worked with Niels Bohr
he traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he worked with Niels Bohr, the theorist who proposed the model of the atom -
Returning to Berlin
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. -
He came to the United States
In the United States, he studied biology and genetics at the California Institute of Technology. He then met Emory Ellis. -
He published his results
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. -
He meets Salvador Luria.
Together, Delbrück and Luria published their work in 1943. They showed the first evidence that bacterial heredity is controlled by genes. -
What he did
Delbrück and Hershey demonstrated that genetic material from different viruses could be combined to make a virus different from each other -
His laboratory gets crowded
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. -
He won the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1969
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He dies
Max Delbruck dies of natural causes in Pasadena, California.
