The Department of Microbiology, Australian National University and the Laboratory of Cell Biology, National Institute of
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Virology
The Department of Microbiology, Australian National University and the Laboratory of Cell Biology, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases W. K. Joklik Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, U.S.A.
Among ancient peoples, epidemic diseases were regarded as supernatural in origin and sent by the gods as punishment for the sins of humans. The treatment and, more important, the prevention of these diseases were sought by sacrifices and lustrations to appease the anger of the gods. Since humans were thought to be willful and wanton by nature, there was never any difficulty in finding a particular set of sins to justity a specific epidemic.
Zinsser Microbiology
Introduction The closing years of the twentieth century provide two very significant anniversies in the history of virology. The first, a century ago, is that of the recognition of viruses as a new class of infectious agents by Mayer, Ivanovsky, Beijerinck, and Loeffier and Frosch; the second, a half century ago, is that of the emergence of molecular virology. Molecular virology became a practical proposition as the result of a series of both conceptual and methodological developments and advances. The most important of these was the conceptualization of the one-step growth cycle: the realization that for identifying the functions encoded by viral genomes - the first essential for understanding the nature of viruses - the system that was required was a synchronized infection cycle of a homogeneous virus population in a homogeneous population of cells. For bacterial viruses such a system had been available for some time; for eukaryotic cells, one-step growth cycles could not be analyzed until the development of tissue culture in the late forties and fifties. Of course, there are some naturally occurring populations of homogeneous cells, the most accessible of which are two membranes in eggs containing developing chick embryos: the chorioallantoic membrane, which is suitable for virus quantitation because infected cells tend to attract white cells, as a result of which foci of such cells initiated by single infectious virus particles become visible as pocks; and the membrane lining the allantoic cavity, which is well suited for studying virus multiplication. Influenza virus grows well in cells lining the allantoic cavity; and since it can also be titrated readily by hemagglutination (devised by Hirst in 1940), it became the virus, in the forties, with which many of the studies were carried out that laid the groundwork for the development of molecular animal virology.
970
Virology Division News
I was fortunate enough to be "in" on the start of molecular virology. I did my doctoral thesis work in Oxford in the early fifties on T 1 bacteriophages; and after a postdoctoral year in Copenhagen with Herman Kalckar on nucleotide metabolism, I joined the Department of Microbiology at the John Curtin School for Medical Research of the Australian National University in Canberra in 1953. It is the first of two
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