Forty years with coronaviruses

Weiss, Susan R.

Indeed, the first international coronavirus conference, organized by Volker ter Meulen, met in Wurzburg, Germany in the fall of 1980, the same year I started my laboratory as an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania, now the Perelman School of Medicine in September 1980. Dr. ter Meulen was passing through Philadelphia, and he invited me to this meeting. That meeting was attended by ∼60 people, which was virtually the entire coronavirus group at that time. This was the era during which the RNA genome and replication strategy used by this group of viruses was discovered. While many talks focused on the model coronavirus, MHV, others were presented on the replication of important coronaviruses of domesticated animals, including infectious bronchitis virus and bovine coronavirus. There were a handful of presentations on human coronavirus 229E, a poorly understood agent of the common cold.