The contribution of virology to contemporary medicine

Abstract

Beginning as a branch of bacteriology, and still regarded as part of microbiology, virology has contributed not only to the conquest of human and animal disease but to the science of biology as a whole. If it now is regarded as a science in its own right, it would not be mischievous to recall that Jenner made his first observations upon milkmaids with cowpox with little realization that he was embarking upon applied virological research. So too was Pasteur when he sought to attempt to attenuate the virulence of the unknown cause of rabies. In our day it is popular to draw distinctions between basic and applied research rather than to emphasize the interplay which should constantly exist between the two. At least physicians should be encouraged to refute the argument that clinical research is of no consequence because it may seem to make no impact upon the immediate problems of human disease. Nor should they be sceptical of the contribution from molecular biochemists utilizing virology as a method for interpreting the inner life of the cell. Molecular virology of this sort may one day make as great a contribution to the conquest of human disease as has immunization in our own time. Yet it is necessary to adopt a defensive attitude over one aspect of virology. All of us who are practitioners tend to look upon the laboratory in terms of its contribution to diagnosis, and in this respect virology at present poses a dilemma. On the one hand, the cultural methods now available enable the laboratory to recover viruses from patients with many of the common self limited infections. For the most part these viruses are the cause of these infections. On the other hand, exact virological diagnosis seldom offers the clinician an opportunity to remedy the clinical situation or to prevent the spread of infection in the community. Exceptionally the laboratory may determine practice as by the direct demonstration of variola virus, the proof of maternal rubella or the revelation of the Australia antigen. But one needs to be careful at present to safeguard the virologist from much fruitless work of retrospective character in order that more fundamental questions may be answered. This situation would change should antiviral chemotherapy become available and depend upon rapid diagnosis. The virus originates from obscurity, inserts itself into the cells of other living matter, and undergoes multiplication into fragments identical with itself. Whether found in plant, bacterium, insect or mammal the virus holds the key to its own reproduction. Truly, nature's secrets have the power to dazzle and to stimulate as much today as in the past centuries. Much has been learnt, and much more remains to be revealed.