Word: chamberland
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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...
Late in the 19th Century a Russian named Iwanowski demonstrated the existence of an infectious something smaller than bacteria by passing a solution from diseased tobacco plants through a Chamberland filter. In time it was found that many animal and human diseases were also due to such viruses: rabies, distemper, foot-and-mouth disease, encephalitis, poliomyelitis, measles, yellow fever, certain tumors, common colds. At Princeton Dr. Stanley grew acres of tobacco plants, infected them with the disease known as tobacco mosaic, ground up their wizened leaves, extracted their juices. This liquid was highly infectious to normal plants. But the deadly...
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