Luminary quits Italy

Renato Dulbecco, the Italian biologist who in 1975 won the Nobel prize for medicine, has announced he has decided to leave Italy and go back to working in the United States because he is fed up with Italy's "bureaucracy, lack of financial support, and salaries which fail to arrive".

The 82-year-old Dulbecco said he had decided to "throw in the towel". "Next year I shall be returning to the United States. I had wanted to create in Italy an advanced centre for biotechnology. But instead I discovered that research here is impossible."

Dulbecco left Italy just before the second world war, following the introduction of anti-Jewish legislation.

In the US he worked on viruses and on their relationship with cancer and eventually identified a virus capable of producing tumours.