On the 130th Anniversary of Virology – Historical Aspects of the Study of Viruses which Cause Infectious Diseases in Farm Animals

Abstract

The year 2022 witnessed the 130th anniversary of the virology science. It was the Russian scientist Dmitri Ivanovsky who proved in 1892, for the first time, the existence of a virus (a new type of pathogen). On February 14, 1892 the results of his research were presented in the report "On two tobacco diseases" at the Academy of Sciences, and later on published in the journal "Agriculture and Forestry". For many decades, every year saw rising interest in viruses, these microscopic extracellular life forms which stand between the living and the non-living, and are capable of infecting cells of living organisms, including bacteria. To this day, the origin of viruses remains one of the most interesting mysteries of biology. There are thousands of viruses which have been studied, however, there are still millions of unknown microorganisms. Viruses in the past and at present remain one of the main etiologic agents of many infectious diseases and they are of great practical interest for veterinary medicine, healthcare and crop production. The virology science have set in long before the viruses themselves were discovered. Back at the end of the XVIII century, a British physician Edward Jenner made the greatest discovery - he developed a live vaccine against smallpox, with which the world began the fight against this terrible disease. After that Louis Pasteur created a method of vaccinations using live weakened vaccines against other diseases, thereby laying the foundation for the scientific justification of the fight against viral diseases.