key: cord-1036964-03u2vtzk
authors: Oldstone, M.B.A.
title: History of Virology
date: 2019-08-28
journal: Encyclopedia of Microbiology
DOI: 10.1016/b978-0-12-801238-3.00078-7
sha: 1ebe995017e8f0fdd1aa3eecfe440c09b90a266c
doc_id: 1036964
cord_uid: 03u2vtzk

The history of virology can be traced as the personalities involved have described their concepts and published their experimental results. Although infections we now know as, e.g., rabies, yellow fever, smallpox, etc. were clinically evident in early human history, the initial isolation of individual viruses and their assignment to specific diseases did not occur until about 1898, 120 years ago, a proverbial drop in the bucket of time. Just one lifetime ago, Peter Medawar, awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1960, defined viruses as a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news.

weeks is followed by signs and symptoms of disease and local or widespread tissue damage. Viruses can be isolated from the patient's blood (serum or blood cells), secretions or washes for a short time just before and after the appearance of symptoms or from their infected tissues. Afterward, the infected host either recovers from the infection, and is often blessed with lifelong immunity to that virus, or dies during the acute phase of illness. Although the majority of life-threatening and debilitating acute virus infections are now controlled through vaccination, it is worthwhile considering the consequences of acute infections like smallpox, measles, and yellow fever in the prevaccine era. Smallpox, before its eradication in 1980, killed over 300 000 000 persons just in the twentieth century and caused a mortality rate of approximately 33% (reviewed in McNeill, 1976, and Oldstone, 2010) . In the sixteenth century, when Native Americans were inadvertently exposed to infectious viruses, often carried by Europeans colonizing the New World, the result was a reduction of the native population in Mexico and Latin America from an estimated 20 million to 2 million. This devastating depopulation came primarily from smallpox and measles infections, since these viruses had never before existed in the New World (Oldstone, 2010) . Smallpox has now been eliminated from our planet and measles virus controlled, at least in most developed countries. However, measles virus infection was and remains a serious disease today with approximately one per thousand infected persons developing severe destruction of the central nervous system requiring institutionalization. Yellow fever spread up the Mississippi River, carried by infected passengers incubating the disease as they traveled on riverboat(s), embarking from the Caribbean to New Orleans on 24 July 1878, moving on to Vicksburg a few days later and arriving in Memphis, where the first case occurred by 14 August (reviewed in Oldstone, 2010) . At that time, no one knew that the infection was transmitted by the bite of Anopheles Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. The mosquito sucks blood from an infected person, then transmits the virus by biting an uninfected susceptible person. At the time of the yellow fever outbreak in Memphis, the city population was approximately 98 000 persons. By the end of the two-month epidemic, 20 000 people had fled Memphis. Of those who stayed, 77% were infected and 70% died. The economic result was the destruction of Memphis as a commercial capital in the American South, to be replaced by Atlanta. As reported in the New York Herald newspaper by writer Robert Blakeslee, on assignment from New York City to Memphis to cover the yellow fever epidemic, "The city was almost deserted . . . We had not gone far, however, before the evidence of the terrible condition of things became apparent. The first thing in the shape of a vehicle that I saw was a truck (wagon), loaded with coffins, going around to collect the dead. As this was within four blocks of the depot you may imagine how Continued Date(s) Virologists/investigators Discovery soon I came to a realizing sense of the desolation. Two blocks further on, coffins were piled on tiers on the sidewalk in front of the undertaker's shop, and we were compelled to walk between them . . . Everyone was thoroughly frightened, a young doctor said to me. 'It takes a man of great moral courage to stay in this place. You talk with a man tonight and tomorrow hear that he is in the grave'" (reviewed in Oldstone, 2010) . To those who consider this part as ancient and perhaps nonrelevant contemporary history, it is well to recall that during the 1918-19 influenza epidemic in the USA, over 600 000 people died in less than 2 years. In the city of Philadelphia and some other locales, the supply of coffins ran out causing the dead to be buried in mass graves. As recently as the 1980s-90s, a similar scenario played out in parts of Africa when the AIDS epidemic caused by HIV resulted in widely publicized mass deaths and still do in parts of Africa and Asia. Now these and many other acute virus infections are controlled by vaccination or antivirals and public health policies when and where they are instituted.

Distinct from those acute infections are persistent infections, a major health problem today. In persistent infection, the immune response fails to completely remove viruses from the body, and those viruses remaining then persist in their host for months or years. For infections like those by hepatitis B and C viruses and HIV, viruses can be recovered from the patients' blood for years, during the long course of infection. Although all components (antibodies and T cells) of the immune response are generated during those infections, the T cell response is compromised (by exhaustion or hyporesponsiveness) and is not capable of eliminating the infectious agent. Table 1 lists events that have impacted the science of virology and its influence on not only diseases but also on the larger milieu of basic research. A more extensive list of important events, observations, and highlights in the discipline of virology has been compiled by Fred Murphy, a long-time contributor to the field, and is accessible at http://www.utmb.edu/virusimages/

Eagle Routine use of tissue culture to grow and study viruses, development of optimal media for growing cells

Krugman Development of poliomyelitis virus vaccine, development of measles virus vaccine: made in tissue culture

Singer Discovery of the infectivity of viral RNA (tobacco mosaic virus)

Prusiner, others Persistent, latent, and slow virus infections, prions 1960s-70s G. Palade, A. Claude, K. Porter, C. DeDuve Description and techniques for fine structure and biochemistry of cellular organelles 1962 A. Klug, D. Caspar Discovery of the principles of icosahedral virus structure

Milstein Development of monoclonal antibodies 1975 B. Blumberg, B. Larouze, W. London, others Discovery of the relationship of hepatitis B virus with hepatocellular carcinoma

others Discovery of Ebola virus 1977 World Health Organization, D.A. Henderson, F. Fenner, and many health workers and virologists Eradication of smallpox as a disease that killed over 300 million people in the twentieth century 1978-83

Notkins Genetic map and function of genes of herpes viruses, herpes latency 1980s-2000s H. zur Hausen, D. Galloway, D. Lowy, I. Frazer, others Recognition of subtypes of papillomaviruses associated with cervical and penile cancer and development of papillomavirus vaccine

others First molecular recombinant virus vaccine: hepatitis B virus, first vaccine to successfully treat cancer: hepatitis B virus-induced liver cancer 1985 K. Mullis, others Invention of polymerase chain reaction (PCR)

others Development of first anti-HIV drug approved by the FDA

Smithies Development of knockout and other genetically manipulated mice

Kawaoka Development of reverse genetics for negative-strand RNA virus 1990-present R. Ahmed, M. Bevin, M. Slifka, and others Kinetics, cell, and molecular basis of T cell and B cell generation and immunologic memory

Bemerkung zu dem aufsatz von herrn Iwanowsky uber die mosaikkrankheit der tabakspflanze

Ueber die mosaikkrankheit der tabakspflanze

Berichte der kommission zur erforschung der maul und klauenseuche bei dem Institut fur Infektionskrankheiten in Berlin

Plagues and Peoples

Viruses, Plagues, & History

An Introduction to the History of Virology

Medzhitov Discovery of cell-surface molecules activated by innate immunity and pathways involved 2000s R. Steinman, Z. Cohn, others Discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity 2000-2015 World Health Organization -many health workers and virologists