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New plaque commemorates scientist who played role in VU's Nobel legacy

by David F. Salisbury

On the third floor of Buttrick Hall, there is a new bronze plaque dedicated to Nobel Laureate Max Delbrück.

It reads, “Located here was the laboratory of Max Delbrück, a member of the physics department faculty from 1940 to 1947. It was then that he and his group conducted fundamental studies that provided the foundation for modern molecular biology. This work led to his receiving, along with Alfred Hershey and Salvador Luria, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969 for discoveries concerning ‘the replication mechanism and genetic structure of viruses.’”

Although well documented in Robert Lagemann’s book To Quarks and A plaque dedicated to Nobel Prize Laureate Max Delbrck and Quasars: A History of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University, the the groundbreaking work he did while at Vanderbilt is crucial role that Vanderbilt played in Delbrück’s life and career has largely located on the third floor of Buttrick Hall. been overlooked in his official biographies. To help rectify this oversight, John Wikswo, the Gordon A. Cain University Professor, organized a centenary Delbrück symposium last fall and had the plaque created and installed.

“Max Delbrück had the greatest influence of any physicist on biology in the 20th century, and we should be proud of the fundamental role that Vanderbilt played in his career,” Wikswo said.

Delbrück, who was born in 1906, was the son of a history professor at the University of Berlin and grew up in a highly intellectual environment. Influenced by the likes of Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Max Born, he decided first to study astronomy and then switched to theoretical physics. Around the time that he received his doctoral degree, the National Socialist Party came into power. Because university professors were state employees, this gave the Nazis control over university hiring. Although government officials allowed him to do university research, they refused to give Delbrück the teaching license that he needed to qualify for a faculty position.

Following the example of many other German scientists at the time, Delbrück came to America to work. He applied for and received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to conduct research at the California Institute of Technology for a year, later extended for a second year. There, he changed his research from theoretical physics to biology. This kept him in the United States until 1939 and the outbreak of World War II. Given the situation in Europe, he decided to stay in the country, but Caltech didn’t have a place for him, so he asked the Rockefeller Foundation for help in finding a job.

Around the same time, Vanderbilt wrote the Rockefeller Foundation saying that it would be interested in hiring one of the German scientists stranded in the united States. The foundation suggested Delbrück, and Francis Slack, then chairman of Vanderbilt’s physics department, recognized he would be a valuable addition to the faculty. As a result, Vanderbilt offered him a position as “instructor in physics.”

One of Delbrück’s initial assignments was teaching introductory physics to an influx of students enrolled in the Army Specialized Training Program. However, it soon became clear that his real talent lay in designing scientific experiments that produced unequivocal and often landmark results.

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In his small Buttrick lab, Delbrück continued his pioneering studies of viruses that attack bacteria (phages or bacteriophages) that he had begun at Caltech. Delbrück thought of phages as “the atoms of biology” and designed a series of simple experiments that measured the progress of phage attacks on bacteria. He began collaborating with Salvador Luria, an Italian expatriate biologist at Columbia University, and they conceived and conducted an experiment that demonstrated that bacteria contain genes, giving birth to the field of bacterial genetics.

In 1942-43, Luria spent a sabbatical at Vanderbilt and Princeton as a Guggenheim fellow, and the first meeting of the famous “Phage Group” that dominated research in the new field for decades was held at Vanderbilt in 1947. Delbrück and Luria then teamed up with Alfred Hershey, a bacteriologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and began the collaboration that would eventually win them the Nobel Prize.

The value of Delbrück’s research was recognized at the time; the university’s 1942-43 annual report contained the statement, “Another research of great importance is that conducted by Dr. Delbrück and his associates in the field of bacteriophage. This is probably the most important piece of research that has been carried on at Vanderbilt for some time. It has attracted national attention.”

As appreciation of Delbrück’s accomplishments spread, he began receiving offers from other universities, including the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of Manchester, both of which had started active phage research programs. However, as late as 1945, Delbrück told colleagues that he was happy at Vanderbilt and had no desire to leave as long as he could continue his research. To do so, however, he felt that he needed upgraded lab facilities and additional assistants and faculty colleagues. He approached the administration with a proposal to establish a separate institute for studying phage at a cost of $500,000. In the post-war period, however, the university was strapped for funds, and the administration was obliged to tell Delbrück that it could not raise such a sum.

As a result, when Caltech offered him a professorship in biology in December 1946, Delbrück accepted the position and returned to Pasadena, Calif., where, just 10 years before, he had first embarked on the research direction that had proven so successful. After moving to Caltech, where he remained until retirement, Delbrück’s research interests quickly moved away from the phage studies that he perfected while at Vanderbilt and for which he received the Nobel Prize.

Posted 02/15/07

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