THE HISTORY OF VIRUSES

The name virus was coined from the Latin word meaning slimy liquid or poison. It was originally used to describe any infectious agent, including the agent of tobacco mosaic disease, tobacco mosaic virus. In the early years of discovery, viruses were referred to as filterable agents. Only later was the term virus restricted to filterable agents that require a living host for propagation. The history of viruses dates back as far as 2300 BC. These are the major discoveries in the history of viruses in the 18^th and the 21^st century.

1796    Edward Jenner discovers that having cowpox disease made a person resistant to smallpox, a much more deadly disease. He begins exposing healthy people to people with cowpox to vaccinate healthy people against smallpox. Thus, Jenner begins the first vaccination program against a viral disease despite the fact that the existence of viruses would not be discovered for another century.
1892    Dmitri Ivanowski launches the field of virology by publishing the first evidence that a particle smaller than a bacterial cell was capable of causing mosaic disease in tobacco plants. This particle would be called the tobacco mosaic disease virus.
1880-85    Louis Pasteur finds a way to change a disease-causing virus particle so that it can be used as a vaccine against the actual viral disease. This process comes to be known as "attenuation."
1889    Friedrich Loeffler discovers that a virus is the cause of foot-and-mouth disease, which affects animals such as sheep and cattle.
1899    Martinus Beijerinck, a Dutch microbiologist, describes viruses as "soluble" living microbes.  He calls the disease agent "contagium vivum fluidium" or contagious living fluid.
1901    Walter Reed discovers that yellow fever, a terrible disease that occurs in the tropics, is caused by a human virus. Several years earlier, Carlos Finlay first proposed that yellow fever was carried from person to person by mosquitoes.
1908    Poliovirus is first identified as the cause of poliomyelitis (polio) by Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper.
1911    Francis Peyton Rous discovers a virus that can cause cancer in chickens. This is the first time a virus is proven to cause cancer.
1915/1917       Fredrick Twort and Félix d'Herelle, separately and simultaneously discover viruses that specifically infect only bacteria; d’Herelle called them "bacteriophage," which literally means "bacteria eater" in Greek.
1918-1920       The most severe flu epidemics known to strike the human population occurs. Commonly referred to as the Spanish Flu Pandemic, it is classified as a category 5 influenza pandemic, with estimates of 50 million to 100 million people killed globally.
1939    Emory L. Ellis and Max Delbrück are the first to accurately describe that the growth of new bacteriophage particles occurs inside the bacterial cell and that all the new bacteriophage are released from the bacterial cell in one big burst.
1939    The tobacco mosaic virus is the first virus to be directly viewed using the newly discovered electron microscope. This work is done by Gustav Kausche, Edgar Pfankuch, and Helmut Ruska. 
1942    Salvador E. Luria and Thomas Anderson are the first scientists to look at a bacteriophage using electron microscopy.
1943    In experiments using a bacteriophage and its bacterial host cell, Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria find that random mutations (changes) in a bacterial cell can prevent the virus from infecting it.  This discovery is important as it shows how evolution works. They and Alfred Hershey win the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in part for this work.
1952    Joshua Lederberg and Norton Zinder discover that viruses can move genes from one host cell to another. 
1952    First cell cultures for propagating viruses are grown by John F. Enders and Frederick C. Robbins.  They are awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954 for this discovery.
1953    André Michel Lwoff first identifies lysogeny as a method of viral infection in bacteria and is awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1965 for this discovery.
1952    The first polio vaccine is developed from a killed virus by Jonas Salk.
1952    Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase use bacteriophages and their bacterial hosts to discover that genes are actually made of DNA.
1957–1958      Flu pandemic, named the Asian Flu, strikes the globe. It is a category 2 flu of avian influenza originating in China. The U.S. death toll reaches about 69,800 people, with a worldwide infection rate from 1 - 4 million people.
1953    James Watson and Francis Crick propose the structure of DNA based in part on data from Rosalind Franklin.
1961    The DNA code is cracked by Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in experiments using bacteriophage T4 and its E. coli bacterial host cell.
1970    Howard Temin and David Baltimore independently discover that some viruses, like the one that causes HIV, have an enzyme to turn RNA into DNA. They are awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1975 for this discovery.
1972    Walter Fiers deciphers the first complete sequence of an entire gene. The gene holds the instructions for making the coat protein of Bacteriophage MS2.
1977    Frederick Sanger uses his new technique for gathering the sequence of DNA to determine the sequence of all the genes of bacteriophage Φ-X174.  The entire collection of genes from an organism is known as a genome. So the first full genome to be deciphered belongs to a virus. Dr. Sanger receives a second Nobel prize in Chemistry for this in 1980.
1984    Francoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier first characterize and isolate the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). They win the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for this discovery.
1989    Two groups of marine microbiologists (Oivind Bergh, Knut Yngve Børsheim, Gunnar Bratbak, and Mikal Heldal from the University of Bergen in Norway; and Lita Proctor and Jed Fuhrman from the Univ. of Southern California) are the first to report the discovery that viruses are the most abundant biological entities in aquatic environments. This discovery inspires new interest in studying viruses in the environment and continues to inspire microbiologists to look at natural communities of viruses.
2002    Mya Breitbart, Forest Rohmer, and co-workers are the first to use DNA sequencing to sample genes from natural communities of viruses in seawater. They discover that marine viruses probably contain more unknown genes than any other group of organisms on planet Earth.
2008    A team of scientists, led by Eric Womack, Shannon Williamson, and Craig Cary, embark on the "Extreme 2008: A Deep-Sea Adventure" expedition to explore viruses within the extreme environments of the deep-sea hydro-thermal vents.

       These are the major discoveries made in the history of virology (the study of viruses). These discoveries have brought about the introduction of vaccines into our lives. The vaccines are used to prevent infections but since viruses can mutate, the vaccines produced are always changed to cope with present mutations (mutagen actions). 

New discoveries will be added soon.