Viruses Analyzed

In the 1870s Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch showed that microscopic germs cause diseases like anthrax, rabies, tuberculosis. Sixty years later and with vastly improved microscopes, bacteriologists are unable to see any germ positively responsible for smallpox, measles, infantile paralysis, the common cold. That invisible, specific contagia cause these diseases and many an-other is certain. Medical scientists call those submicroscopic substances viruses. But they do not know their true nature, and hence cannot scientifically prevent common colds or infantile paralysis (see p. 36).

Last winter Chemist Wendell Meredith Stanley of the Rockefeller Institute appeared at Atlantic City where the Association for the Advancement of Science was holding its annual meeting, and informed the whole scientific world 1) that a virus was a huge molecule composed basically of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, weighing 17,000,000 times as-much as a hydrogen molecule, and measuring one seven-hundred-thousandth of an inch in diameter; 2) that he had crystallized a typical virus (which causes mosaic diseases in tobacco plants) by chemical treatment; 3) that he had modified the virus molecule chemically and produced other types of plant disease; 4) that he had made the molecule inactive. All this proved, said Dr. Stanley, that "a virus is a protein molecule and as such may be regarded as non-living." The A. A. A. S. gave him a $1,000 prize for his work (TIME, Jan. 11).

There remained, however, one grave doubt about Dr. Stanley's work. Did his chemical treatment of viruses alter them? The Rockefeller staff had the answer to that. But they waited until last week when the summer meeting of the A. A. A. S. at Denver (see p. 40) again gave them a big, public stage.

Dr. Ralph Walter Graystone Wyckoff, a Rockefeller biophysicist, uses a squeeze-press, an ultracentrifuge (TIME, Feb. 6, 1933), and an X-ray analyzer of crystalline substances. The press enables him to get juices from infected tissue without modifying ingredients in the slightest. The ultracentrifuge, whirling at 50,000 revolutions per minute, separates the ingredients into layers, including one of pure crystalline virus. X-rays prove that this virus, obtained by physical means, is exactly the same as the virus which Dr. Stanley obtained by chemical means.

Therefore, in all probability viruses are lifeless molecules. And, concluded Dr. Wyckoff, sweating on one of the hottest days Denver ever experienced, "a new field of research into the mechanism and control of disease is opened up by the possibility of treating its cause as a pure chemical compound. It is not unreasonable to hope that experiments of this type will some day indicate a new way in which the body can protect itself against dis-ease."

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