At a conference in Cold Spring Harbor, Renato Dulbecco launched the idea of mapping the entire human genome; initially dismissed as derision or a science fiction venture, it was soon taken seriously. Dulbecco, a Nobel Prize winner, was Italian by birth, a Catholic partisan, and left Italy for the United States in 1947. In 1973, the year of the Nobel Prize, Italy stripped him of his citizenship. In December 2005, he left Italy forever for California.
