Italian Nobel Prize Renato Dulbecco dies at 97

Renato Dulbecco, who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in medicine for "discoveries concerning the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell", has died in California.

In 1986, Dulbecco wrote a seminal editorial in the journal Science (A turning point in cancer research: sequencing the human genome) in which he called for sequencing the human genome to understand tumor virology and cancer in general — the research that came to be the Human Genome Project.

Dulbecco worked on the Italian Genome Project from 1992 until 1997, but financing dried up and he returned full-time to Salk.

I'm sure Prof. Dulbecco was happy to see before dying that the $1000 genome is just around the corner.