CENTERPIECE
A MAN OF SCIENCE; A MAN OF POLITICS
MIT'S SALVADOR LURIA, ACTIVIST AND NOBEL LAURIATE, KEEPS HIS TWO ROLES
SEPARATE

Author: By Andrew Bagnato Contributing Reporter

Date: Saturday, August 25, 1984
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER

"My politics does not influence my scientific work," said Luria on a recent afternoon at his vacation home here, where he is recovering from his second back operation in a year. "I'm a split person."

The energetic 72-year-old director of the Center for Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently published his autobiography, "A Slot Machine, A Broken Test Tube." It describes the professional Luria but also tells about a man who has avoided the spotlight and who believes in the old-fashioned ideas of a strong family and hard work.

He said he internalized those concepts during the 15 years he spent teaching in Indiana and Illinois. "It's really been the Middle West that created me," he said, stroking his dog, Pablo. "I feel so Americanized. I don't feel strongly Jewish or Italian anymore."

Dr. Gene Brown, head of MIT's biology department, said Luria never stopped working hard even after he achieved scientific success. "He has that sort of Midwestern work ethic," said Brown, who has known Luria for three decades. "It's not something you lose. He likes to get into work early and put in a full day."

Luria's colleagues and friends express amazement over his boundless energy. The back surgery last month has tired him; he has to lie on a couch while talking with a visitor to his unpretentous four-bedroom home. But Luria says he won't slow down: he plans to resume his full-time duties at the Cancer Center next month.

Luria always seems to have the energy to pile one responsibility onto another. There is, for instance, the deal he made with his wife, Zella, during the early 1960s. The Lurias were having dinner with another couple when the women said husbands should help with housework.

"I opened my big mouth and said, Helping is nothing. You must share to be equal.' My wife picked up on it and said, You take August and I'll take July,' " Luria recalls with a laugh. He began shopping and cooking regularly; he was rinsing the breakfast dishes when he learned he had won the Nobel Prize.

Luria's help with the housework disappointed some Italian friends, who thought it wasn't a very macho thing for a scientist to do. Never macho to begin with (as an officer in the Italian army, he rode a bicycle instead of a horse), Luria said the decision to help out was a little selfish.

"I had never felt so decent as when I did my share," said Luria, whose back ailment, which he attributes to his lack of fitness as a child, has curtailed his household chores. "My wife had done all that and worked full time for 25 years. The fact that I did that was a great source of pride to me."

He also takes pride in Zella's accomplishments in psychology. Her career had been slowed by an anti-nepotism rule at Illinois that prohibited having two members of the same family on the faculty.

Faced with the prospect of staying in his beloved Midwest or going to Massachusetts, where Zella had an offer at Tufts University and he at MIT, Luria chose to move.

His decision did not surprise friends of the couple. "There's no question that he looks upon Zella as an equal partner in every respect," said Brown. "He recognizes that her career is just as important as his career." Zella, 60, a professor of psychology at Tufts, says her husband always has been supportive of her career.

The medical Luria is a highly respected molecular biologist who was on a three-scientist team that discovered the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses and won a 1969 Nobel Prize. He has earned the praise of scientists around the world. Dr. John Cairns of the Harvard School of Public Health said, "Salvador's experiments are absolute classics."

The political Luria is an avowed socialist who demands equality, whether in economics or women's rights; he also has been an ardent critic of conservative government policies. In the 1960s, Luria led peace marches and organized rallies to protest US involvement in Vietnam. Now, he is an outspoken opponent of American intervention in Nicaragua.

Luria said he developed his socialist views while living in Paris for two years before the Nazi invasion. He had fled Italy, where he was born into a Jewish family in 1912, to avoid religious persecution by the Fascists. The Paris he found was a city alive with heated debate of the day's issues, piquing his political interest for the first time.

"After coming from a country where all the newspapers said the same thing, I was in a place where there were eight or nine different views to listen to," he said. "You had to look around and make a decision."

Luria's decision that socialism made the most sense was reinforced when he arrived in the United States in 1940. "When I came to this country it was easy for me to see the New Deal offered a form of progressivism and some socialism," he said. "It was very convincing."

Luria said he paid for his beliefs during the McCarthy era. While teaching at the University of Illinois in 1951, he said, he was denied a passport
because of his socialist views, And he said his political leanings had made him unpopular with the administration at Indiana University, where he taught before moving to Illinois.

"It was a slightly difficult but very exciting period for me," he said. "It was a test of endurance to keep up your political work. The only way to fight them was to not be intimidated."

If his continued activism in the 1960s was any indication, Luria was not intimidated. His son, Daniel, recalled the many evenings Luria spent at home during the Vietnam war, phoning colleagues to build support for the peace movement. "I got the message that work is very important, and that the family was important, but that politics was most important. That always came through," said Daniel, 35, a research economist with the United Automobile Workers in Detroit.

But Luria has been less active in the years following Vietnam. Today, he follows politics closely but his bad back prevents him from marching or participating in sit-ins, as he did with MIT students during the late 1960s.

Still, he refuses to dwell on the past, preferring to live in the "eternal present," as he calls it. "It's not because I'm dissatisfied with what I've done," he said with a shrug. "I have never looked back."

BAGNAT;08/20,09:41 CORCOR;08/26,10 B07636704