Viruses - the Microscopes Story

In Invisible Empire, Pranay Lal points out that it was the invention of the microscope that finally proved that “infinitesimally tiny organisms” did exist:

“The microscope became a weapon for scientific validation.”

The inventor of some of the best microscopes of the time, Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, wrote a lot about the different types of microbes he could see. These came to be called bacteria.

 

As the microscopes kept getting better, the aim turned from curiosity to trying to identify which bacteria caused particular diseases. Man learnt to even isolate and grow bacteria in culture. In 1857, an unknown agricultural disease hit tobacco. Adolf Mayer found that whatever caused the disease could pass through filter paper. But not through double filter paper. He concluded that the microbe in question was a bacteria, but far tinier than anything that could be seen with the best equipment of the times.

 

In 1885, Martinus Beijernick was investigating a different tobacco disease.  Its cause too seemed to be something tinier than the known bacteria, but the agent in question seemed to survive in all kinds of conditions that bacteria couldn’t. Beijernick concluded that it must therefore be another entity, not a bacteria. He decided to call it… a “virus”.

 

Etymologically speaking, the term’s root comes from Sanskrit (विष), which in Latin became the root for words like venom (poison). In Middle English, the word also came to mean semen.

“The word therefore signifies both birth and death at once.”

It would prove to be a very apt choice of terminology.

 

Beijernick didn’t live to see his theory validated. That would have to wait for the invention for the next level of microscopes. These new microscopes were needed for (and created based on) physics!

“Physicists discovered that beams of electrons behave as waves, with wavelengths shorter than visible light. This opened up new opportunities to see the unseen in, literally, a “different light”.”

It was through these electron microscopes that the first virus were finally “seen”.

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