Preface

With a nod toTo Catch a Thief, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 classic mystery film, this book tells the story of the ways in which viruses are captured and identified. It is a chronicle of discovery and diagnosis, a history of diagnostic virology. It begins with yellow fever, the first human disease shown to be viral in nature. That happened in Cuba at the turn of the 20th century, when Walter Reed and the Yellow Fever Commission demonstrated that the disease was transmitted by mosquitoes. They then showed that the agent passed through a filter designed to hold back bacteria, a defining characteristic of viruses. The chronicle has continued through more than a century of historical developments, epidemics, and discoveries, coming into the 21st century with AIDS and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and looking into the future.

Diagnostic virology sits astride the confluence of dynamic developments in science, public health struggles with epidemics and emerging diseases, and the intensive medical care of individual patients. Virology as a science was built on the emergence of germ theory and on the developments of cell technology. Most recently, it has made unprecedented advances based on the dizzying progress of molecular biology. During the time covered by this book, terrifying epidemics have made their appearance. The influenza epidemic of 1918 to 1919 is estimated to have killed 25 to 50 million people worldwide, more than all the military casualties of World War I combined. Yet it was not until 1933 that the influenza virus was finally captured and identified in an unusual host, the ferret. The global pandemic of AIDS, which revealed itself in 1981, had by 2008 killed over 25 million people. It became the driver of molecular diagnostic techniques. In so doing, it dramatically amplified the paradigm of diagnostic virology from making a diagnosis, often after the fact, to prompt diagnosis and active disease management of individual patients.

History and commerce have had a critical hand in the advances in virological diagnosis. The first agent identified as a virus, tobacco mosaic virus, was investigated because of the threat to a commercial crop. The date of that discovery, 1892, is usually identified as the start of virology. The second virus was identified in 1899, foot-and-mouth disease virus. Similar to tobacco mosaic virus, it was examined because of a commercial threat to farm animals and cattle. Wars, too, have driven developments in virology. The demonstration of yellow fever virus had been initiated by the need of the Army to protect soldiers in Cuba in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. Another first, the establishment of the first viral and rickettsial diagnostic lab, was a response to the incipient World War II (WWII). The Army established the lab at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in January 1941 in Washington, DC. That is the date on which independent diagnostic virology labs, in contrast to labs devoted primarily to research, can be said to have begun.

The president during WWII, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), whose ringing words in d