Pontecorvo was educated at the universities of Pisa (doctorate in agricultural sciences, 1928), Edinburgh (Ph.D., 1941), and Leicester (D.Sc., 1968). While at Edinburgh he worked with the American geneticist Hermann Muller; under Muller’s influence Pontecorvo designed a method for studying genetic differences among species that ordinarily produce sterile hybrids when interbred. That method permitted him to study evolutionary divergence in the fruit fly Drosophila. The conviction that research in microbial genetics could lead to increased production of the drug penicillin, much needed in World War II, led him in 1943 to the genetics of fungi. In 1950 he found that recombination of genes can occur in the filamentous fungus Aspergillus nidulans without sexual reproduction. Nonsexual gene recombination became a useful technique in probing the nature of gene action.
Pontecorvo was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1946) and the Royal Society of London (1955). He received honorary degrees from several universities, and he was awarded the Hansen Foundation prize for microbiology (1961) and the Royal Society’s Darwin Medal (1978). Pontecorvo was appointed to the first chair of genetics at the University of Glasgow in 1955 after serving for 10 years as the head of that university’s newly created genetics department. In 1968 he moved to London to work at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories, where he remained until his retirement in 1975.