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.

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.

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

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