On the Early Period of the Discovery of Human Retroviruses and Lessons Forthe Future

摘要

I am pleased to provide personal comments on the early history of human retro-viruses and the possible lessons that research on them may have for students. We have known of viruses for a little over one century, and in the earliest decades, of course, they were not characterized. We know them in that period mainly as agents too tiny to see by the standard microscopy of the day, but still often able to produce disease when inoculated into animals in ultrafiltrates derived from extracts of some biological specimens. It is interesting that in retrospect retroviruses were among the earliest known viruses. However, in those early days they were usually described as tumor viruses or oncornaviruses, and when biochemical techniques could be exploited the term RNA tumor viruses came into play, even though it was soon appreciated that this kind of virus also included viruses that apparently never caused animal tumors but instead non-neoplastic diseases. Other names were also used, especially names like types A, B, C and D, that derived from the morphology of the variant forms of these viruses as seen by the technique of electron microscopy. Electron microscopy, of course, greatly accelerated the pace of virological research and was a mainstay of virology laboratories from the middle of the last century until the 1980s when biochemical, molecular biological, and immunological techniques made electron microscopy far less useful and more the specialty of the experts in fine structure.