ABSTRACT
Max Delbruck was a founder of molecular biology. Delbruck’s initial introduction to biology at Caltech was disappointing, despite the help of A. H. Sturtevant and Calvin Bridges, with whom he was especially friendly; he found the highly specialized Drosophila jargon too difficult and exacting to grasp in a reasonable time. Delbruck was on the faculty of Vanderbilt University from 1940 to 1947 but had no students of biology. Delbruck and Luria had become interested in some papers on phage by Alfred H. Hershey, a microbiologist at the Medical School of Washington University, in St. Louis, and these three, Delbruck, Luria, and Hershey, formed the nucleus of the Phage Group. In 1950, A. D. Hershey joined the Department of Genetics of Carnegie Institution of Washington, which was also located at Cold Spring Harbor. Although pneumococcal transformation was certainly seen as a very interesting phenomenon by Delbruck and S. E. Luria, there were understandable reasons for failing to recognize its genetic importance.
