Abstract
The year 1998 is the centenary year of the discovery of viruses. Critical experiments by Beijerinck (1898) proved for the first time that tobacco mosaic disease was not caused by a bacterium or any corpuscular organism. He called this agent ‘contagium vivum fluidum’. Since then, the science of virology has come a long way and has played an important role in our understanding of modern biology. The isolation and crystallization of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) by Stanley (1935), demonstration that TMV particles contain nucleic acid of the ribose type by Bawden and Pirie (1937), the findings of Hershey and Chase (1952) that the protein of T2 bacteriophage does not enter bacterial cells during infection, and those of Fraenkel-Conrat (1956) and Gierer and Schramm (1956) that the nucleic acid of TMV is the main infective component laid the foundations of molecular biology and biotechnology.
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