ABOUT BOOK

The title of the book pays tribute to two Dutch scientists without whom ~virology would arguably not exist today, at least not in its present guise. The ~first is Antony van Leeuwenhoek, whose reports of microscopic discoveries ~in the early eighteenth century aroused interest in the world of invisible ~creatures. His findings laid the basis for a theory of a particulate cause ~of infectious diseases, but, as George Rosen wrote, without any tangible ~results in support of the theory (1993/1958, pp. 84-85). Some 250 years later ~Martinus Willem Beijerinck launched the discipline of virology with his ~idea that tobacco mosaic disease (TMD) was caused by a living contagious ~fluid or filterable living pathogen.