How Seeing Became Knowing: The Role of the Electron Microscope in Shaping the Modern Definition of Viruses.

This paper examines the vital role played by electron microscopy toward the modern definition of viruses, as formulated in the late 1950s. Before the 1930s viruses could neither be visualized by available technologies nor grown in artificial media. As such they were usually identified by their ability to cause diseases in their hosts and defined in such negative terms as "ultramicroscopic" or invisible infectious agents that could not be cultivated outside living cells.

[From war to priority battle; blood transfusion as a medical innovation during World War I].

The logistics system for blood transfusion was first developed on the Western Front during World War I. This article focuses on the people who played a major role in this development. It discusses the people who came up with the idea of preventing coagulation through addition of citrate and who discovered the stabilisation of blood by adding glucose.

ANDREWES'S CHRISTMAS FAIRY TALE: ATYPICAL THINKING ABOUT CANCER AETIOLOGY IN 1935.

This paper uses a short 'Christmas fairy-story for oncologists' sent by Christopher Andrewes with a 1935 letter to Peyton Rous as the centrepiece of a reflection on the state of knowledge and speculation about the viral aetiology of cancer in the 1930s. Although explicitly not intended for public circulation at the time, the fairy-story merits publication for its significance in the history of ideas about viruses, which are taken for granted today. Andrewes and Rous were prominent members of the international medical research community and yet faced strong resistance to their theory that viruses could cause such tumours as chicken sarcomas and rabbit papillomas.

[Snippets of past medical research: worth saving?].

Medical researchers and physicians are not trained in the care of their written or digital past. Here, a scientific historian and a clinical epidemiologist reflect on possibilities for archiving the records of medical research in order to safeguard scientific legacies. In addition to the use of so-called witness seminars, which may suffer from interpretation by 'hindsight', archival material is necessary to understand and interpret the past.

'Virus & Cancer Studies'--still fascinating after all these years (2014).

A few valedictory remarks to 100 years of Viruses & Cancer.

A century of research into the cause of cancer: is the new oncogene paradigm revolutionary?

Contemporary oncological research is predominantly characterised by genetic explanations, a situation which may be briefly denoted as the oncogene paradigm. This essay discusses why the new paradigm was perceived so attractive that it could take over the whole field of oncology within a time-span of less than two decades. It is argued that the revolutionary character of the oncogene paradigm stems from the fact that it transcends a dichotomy which has kept experimental cancer research divided for more than three quarters of a century.

A bacteriological paradigm in influenza research in the first half of the twentieth century.

Scholars have argued that the beginning of virology can be dated from the end of the 19th century: the discovery that some infectious agents could pass through ultrafilters produced a criterium to distinguish ultrafilterable viruses from infectious agents that are not filterable, e.g. bacteria.