Timeline of Virology

Timeline of Virology

·         1500 B.C.: Polio in Egypt

·         1200 B.C.: Smallpox in Egypt

·         11^th century: Variolation practised in Asia and Africa: the deliberate infection of smallpox virus.

·         1796: Edward Jenner developed a smallpox vaccine using cowpox

·         1885: Louis Pasteur successfully developed rabies vaccination.

·         1892: Dimitri Ivanovski showed that the tobacco mosaic disease could be transmitted by extracts that were filtered by the filters fine enough to exclude the smallest known bacteria.

·         1898: Martinus Beijerinck found that the agent that caused the tobacco mosaic disease was not a mere toxin since it grew in the host.

·         1911: Francis Peyton Rous in 1911 described an oncovirus in chickens.

·         1911: Frederick Twort recognized the existence of viruses that infect bacteria.

·         1935: Wendell Stanley achieved the crystallization of the tobacco mosaic virus for electron microscopy and showed that it remains active even after crystallization.

·         1937: Max Delbruck described the basic life cycle of a virus.

·         1937: Max Theiler grew the Yellow Fever virus in chicken eggs and produced a vaccine from an attenuated virus strain.

·         1952: Hershey-Chase experiment showed that only DNA and not protein enters a bacterial cell upon infection with bacteriophage T2.

·         1955: Rosalind Franklin proposed the full structure of the tobacco mosaic virus.

·         1963: Hepatitis B virus discovered by Baruch Blumberg.

·         1965: Howard Temin described the first retrovirus.

·         1976: First recorded outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever.

·         1977: Frederick Sanger achieved the first complete sequencing of the genome of any organism, the bacteriophage Phi X 174.

·         1977: Richard Roberts and Phillip Sharp showed that the genes of adenovirus contains introns and therefore require gene splicing.

·         1979: A world-wide vaccination campaign led by the UN World Health Organization resulted in the eradication of smallpox.

·         1982: Stanley Prusiner discovered prions and showed that they cause scrapie.

·         1985: Harald zur Hausen showed that two strains of the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) cause most cases of cervical cancer.

·         2002: Poliovirus was synthetically assembled in the laboratory.

·         2003: Bacteriophage Phi X 174 was synthetically assembled in the laboratory.

·         2004: Giant mimivirus was sequenced.

·         2006: Two vaccines protecting against the two cancer causing strains of the HPV were released.