Max Delbrück was born in
Berlin, Germany. His father was
Hans Delbrück, a professor of
history at the
University of Berlin, and his mother was the granddaughter of
Justus von Liebig.
Delbrück studied
astrophysics, shifting towards
theoretical physics, at the
University of Göttingen. After receiving 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. Delbrück went back to Berlin in 1932 as an assistant to
Lise Meitner.
In 1937, he moved to the
United States to pursue his interests in biology, taking up research in the Biology Division at
Caltech on
genetics of the fruit fly
Drosophila melanogaster. While at Caltech Delbrück became acquainted with
bacteria and their viruses (
bacteriophage or 'phage'). In 1939, he co-authored a paper called
The Growth of Bacteriophage with
E.L. Ellis in which they demonstrated that
viruses reproduce in "
one step", rather than exponentially as
cellular organisms do.
In 1941, he married Mary Bruce, with whom he had four children. Delbrück's brother
Justus Delbrück, a lawyer, his sister
Emmi Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law
Klaus Bonhoeffer (brother of the theologian,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer) were in the German Resistance against the
Nazi Regime. Klaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were executed in the last days of Hitler's Germany.
Delbrück remained in the US during
World War II, teaching physics at
Vanderbilt University in
Nashville while pursuing his genetic research. In 1942, he and
Salvador Luria of Indiana University demonstrated that
bacterial resistance to
virus infection is caused by random
mutation and not adaptive change. This research, known as the
Luria-Delbrück experiment, was also significant for its use of mathematics to make quantitative predictions for the results to be expected from alternative models. For that work, they were awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in
1969, sharing it with
Alfred Hershey. In the same year together with
Salvador Luria he was awarded the
Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from
Columbia University.
In
1947, Delbrück returned to Caltech as a professor of biology where he remained until
1977.
From the
1950s on, Delbrück applied biophysical methods to problems in sensory
physiology rather than genetics. He also set up the institute for
molecular genetics at the
University of Cologne.
Delbrück was one of the most influential people in the movement of physical scientists into biology during the 20th century. Delbrück's thinking about the physical basis of life stimulated
Erwin Schrödinger to write the highly influential book,
What Is Life?. Schrödinger's book was an important influence on
Francis Crick, James D. Watson and
Maurice Wilkins who won a Nobel prize for the discovery of the DNA double helix. During the 1940s Delbrück developed a course in bacteriophage genetics at the
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to encourage interest in the field. Delbrück's efforts to promote the "
Phage Group" (exploring genetics by way of the viruses that infect bacteria) was important in the early development of
molecular biology.
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