Let's Cover Up The Fact That The Discovery Of The Virus Began.

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Snake venom

 The word virus is contradictory. It is a Roman word. Here it also meant the venom of a snake and the sperm of a man. Destruction and creation, in one word. In the following centuries, the word virus took on another meaning. An infectious material that can spread the disease. It could also be a liquid, such as a wound healing material. It could also be a mysterious object floating in the air. It could also affect a leaf, as if touching a finger could spread the disease. It began to take on its current meaning at the end of the nineteenth century, due to an agricultural catastrophe.

The virus started in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands in 1879 a disease was spreading in the tobacco fields which was stopping the growth of plants. The young agricultural chemist who researched it was Adolf Meyer. They found that if juice was collected from diseased plants and poured into healthy plants, these plants would also become diseased, which means that it was due to a microscopic pathogen growing inside the plants. But which one Meyer could not find it.

Research by Martinez Byrnek

Another Dutch scientist, Martinez Byrnek, carried on the research a few years later. What was it Something much smaller than bacteria? They grind diseased plants and pass the resulting liquid through a very fine sieve, which could also filter plant cells and bacteria. The clear liquid was obtained and injected into healthy plants. The plants got sick.

Byrnek now filters the juice in the same way from the newly diseased plants. It also made new plants sick. Whatever it was, it was in the juice, much smaller than the bacteria, could copy itself and spread the disease.

Whatever was in the fluid was different from anything that biologists of the time knew. Not only very small but also very hard. Added alcohol, did not affect its ability to infect. It warmed up, it didn't matter. It wetted a filter paper. After teaching it, it was kept for three months and then put in water. This solution also made new plants sick.

Byrnek used the word "virus" for this mysterious agent. This was the first use of the word in its modern sense. Byrnek explained what viruses are. It's not animals, it's not plants, it's not fungi, it's not bacteria. Beyond that came the limit of nineteenth-century science, beyond which nothing could be known.

New tools and better ideas were needed to better understand the virus. The electron microscope gave scientists a chance to see what they are. Very small particles Bacteria are too big for them. (Attached image for comparison).

Despite their small size, scientists have found ways to look inside them and operate on them. A human cell is made up of millions of molecules that sense the environment, eat food, grow, decide when to split into two, or to commit suicide for the good of fellow cells. Virologists have found that viruses are much simpler than that. The guinea pigs in the protein shell contain the genes. They discovered that viruses could hijack other forms of life, despite their simplicity and limited genetic instructions. They could see the virus inject their genes and proteins into their hosts and take control of them and make copies of them. A virus could enter a cell and make a thousand copies the next day.

Virologists knew these basic facts by the 1950s, but there was still much to learn in virology. Virologists did not know how many different ways viruses make people sick. They did not know how papillomavirus can remove rabbit horns and cause millions of women to develop cervical cancer each year. They did not know why some viruses are deadly and some are harmless. It is unknown at this time what he will do after leaving the post. Why do they evolve faster than anything else? Little did they know at the time that a virus had spread from chimpanzees to humans, spreading and would become one of the biggest killers of humanity in three decades. They had no idea how many types and types of viruses there were on Earth. And that the genetic diversity of life is in most viruses. Little did they know that they acted as planetary temperature thermostats. They are responsible for most of the oxygen produced in the earth. Our breaths are due to them. Little did we know that a significant portion of the human genome itself contains thousands of viruses that have infected our distant ancestors at various times, or that the virus may have started life four billion years ago. Was pushed.

Now scientists know some of these things. They can detect the presence of the virus inside the human body or in difficult places on the earth. The understanding of the viruses on this planet is not yet deep, but they are beginning to be understood.

Vehara Ambakar