Word: beijerinck
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Dates: during 1961-1961
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Most of the bacteria studied by Pasteur and his early followers were big enough to be trapped in fine porcelain filters, devised by Pasteur's assistant Charles Chamberland, and to be seen under the 19th century light microscope. It was a temperamental Dutch botanist, Martinus Beijerinck (1851-1931), who found that whatever caused mosaic disease in tobacco plants could slip through the minute pores of these filters. In 1897 he concluded that this infectious, filter-passing fluid was a "filterable virus." The word virus had been loosely used for centuries to denote any "poison" that caused infectious disease...
...appeared in 1938: the electron microscope, in which beams of electrons are focused sharply enough to take photographs of objects less than a millionth of an inch across. This made many virus particles visualizable-and another Rockefeller fellow had something to visualize. Indiana-born Wendell Stanley went back to Beijerinck's favorite, the tobacco mosaic virus, or TMV, and spent years in a Princeton laboratory cooking down a ton of sickly tobacco leaves, filtering and re-filtering, dissolving and redissolving, until he had isolated the cause of this economically costly disease. What he had to show for years...
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