Salvador Edward Luria was an Italian microbiologist, later a naturalized American citizen. Salvador Luria showed that bacterial resistance to viruses is genetically inherited. Salvador Edward Luria was born on August 13th, 1912, in Torino, Italy. He has been a naturalized citizen of the U.S.A. since January 1947. Luria graduated from the University of Turin in 1935 and became a radiologyspecialist. He fled Italy for France in 1938 and went to the United States in 1940 after learning the techniques of phage research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Soon after his arrival, he met Delbruck, through whom he became involved with the American Phage Group, an informal scientific organization devoted to solving the problems of viral self-replication. Working with a member of the group in 1942, Luria obtained one of the electron micrographs of phage particles, which confirmed earlier descriptions of them as consisting of a round head and a thin tail. He received the National Medal Of Science in 1991. He died on February 6, 1991 in Lexington, Massachusetts, United States.