Is Virology Dead?

DiMaio, Daniel

Virology was once held in high esteem. In the first half of the 20th century, plant viruses held center stage. Studies of mosaic disease of tobacco revealed the existence of a new class of infectious agents smaller than bacteria, and tobacco mosaic virus taught us that viruses could be crystallized, disassembled, and reassembled into an infectious form: "life" could be studied with chemical approaches (2, 3) . In the 1950s and 1960s, viruses that infect bacteria played a central role in the biological sciences. They formed the basis of the Hershey-Chase experiment, the first widely accepted evidence that DNA is the genetic material (4). Bacteriophage also led to the discovery of mRNA and the triplet nature of the genetic code and played a leading role in the birth of molecular biology (5) . The 1970s and 1980s were a golden age for animal virology. The small genomes of many animal viruses and the ease of introducing them into cells made them the model organisms of choice to study eukaryotic cells. mRNA splicing, transcriptional enhancers, oncogenes, tumor suppressor proteins, antiapoptotic proteins, cellular trafficking signals and pathways, major histocompatibility complex (MHC) restriction, and much fundamental cell biology and biochemistry were discovered through studies of animal viruses (6) . The roster of Nobel Prizes awarded for studies of viruses is long and unequaled.