# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/max-delbruck
# Generated: 2026-08-31T16:44:57.790Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/max-delbruck"
name: "Max Delbrück"
slug: "max-delbruck"
description: "A physicist who walked into biology and rewired the whole discipline. Delbrück made viruses—specifically the bacteria-eating kind—into the tool that cracked open how genes actually work."
tagline: "Biophysicist (1906–1981)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Maxdelbr%C3%BCck-cr.jpg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
country:
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  isoCode: "DE"
category:
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  slug: "academics"
profileType:
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  slug: "academic"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1906-09-04"
deathDate: "1981-03-09"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           57.82
  momentum:             10.02
  historical:           23.903788
  currentAttention:     4.535714285714286
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "STABLE"
ranks:
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  country:  null
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück was born September 4, 1906, and trained as a physicist in Germany before crossing into biology in the late 1930s with a simple conviction: genes were physical objects and could be studied as such. He convinced other physical scientists to follow, turning bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria—into a precision instrument for genetic research. In 1945 he formed the Phage Group with Salvador Luria and Alfred Hershey, and over the next two decades they pulled apart how viruses replicate and how genetic information moves. The three shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for those discoveries. Delbrück died March 9, 1981, having launched molecular biology by insisting that the most mysterious problems in life could be solved with clear physics and a good virus.