The embryonic beginning of virology: unbiased thinking and dogmatic stagnation
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The embryonic beginning of virology: unbiased thinking and dogmatic stagnation L. Bos Research Institute for Plant Protection (IPO-DLO), Wageningen, The Netherlands
Introduction Occasions, such as the recent appearance of the Encyclopedia of Virology, provide an opportunity to reconsider the discipline's roots and to critically reexamine the past. In plant pathology, Mayer [20], Ivanovsky [9] and Beijerinck [ 1] have, for their classical investigations on tobacco mosaic published between 1886 and 1898, for long been considered to have set the stage for virology as a new discipline, and to have done so together [12]. However, a minireview on "One Hundred Years of Virology" that was published in 1992 [ 18] fixed the beginning of virology to 1892, and claimed Ivanovsky's role "as the father of the new science of Virology". The review must have served as a prelim to the "Foreword: I00 Years of Virology", published two years later in the new Encyclopedia of Virology [17]. The foreword affirmed Ivanovsky's "priority to the discovery of viruses" and his keyrole in the history of the science covered by the encyclopedia, and hailed this exemplary ''pioneering spirit". Since a number of data conflict with historicaI fact, a 'letter' on the matter has recently been submitted and meanwhile accepted for publication [5], and the present article now provides some further documentation. Ivanovsky Ivanovsky is usually quoted for his classical filtration experiments demonstrating passage of the causative agent of tobacco mosaic through the pores of a bacteria-proof Chamberland filter. His paper, read before the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1892 [9], is a landmark in the history of virology. Of special significance, however, is Ivanovsky's commonly ignored dissertation published in German in 1903 while he was working in Warsaw [11]. Lustig and Levine [18] have obviously studied that paper since they refer to it when mentioning Ivanovsky's work on the inclusion bodies in the host cells of virusdiseased plants [17]; however, they overlooked its last, historically most important section on "the culture of the microbe of the mosaic disease". Peculiarly enough, the same had been done by Johnson (1942) in his biographical sketches accompanying the English translations of the papers by Mayer, Ivanovsky and Beijerinck [ 12], published in the Phytopathological Classics of the American Phytopathological Society. From the beginning Ivanovsky had kept insisting that he was dealing with a microbe that might have passed the pores of the bacteria-proof filter or might have produced a filterable toxin [9]. In reaction to Beijerinck's report, he related in 1899 that by 1892, he had
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"succeeded in evoking the disease by inoculation of a bacterial culture, which strengthened my hope that the entire problem will be solved without such bold hypotheses" [10]. Kluyver, Beijerinck's successor in Delft, later wrote that "anybody reading Ivanovsky's 1899 paper
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