Started reading Carl Zimmer’s “A Planet of Viruses,” and right in the first chapter, I notice an inconsistency. The author is supposedly renowned, but disappoints: the story of the discovery of viruses does not mention Dimitri Ivanovsky, who is traditionally considered the founding father of virology.
According to Zimmer, after Adolf Mayer’s studies on diseased tobacco in 1876, follow Martin Beijerinck’s work in 1898, followed by a series of second-wave scientists and discoveries.
This is not quite accurate: traditionally, Ivanovsky follows Mayer (1892), who hypothesized that the contagion was either a toxin or a microbacterium, and then six years later, Beijerinck appears, who merely repeated Ivanovsky’s experiment with Chamberland filters, and “properly presented” it to the scientific community.
This is such a well-known fact that I could even omit the proof link, but still – attached are an article from the Journal of Virology and an excerpt from the book “A Planet of Viruses”.
So much for reading Zimmer after this! Everywhere deception 🙂
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 