The Life of a Virus

In this latest contribution to the growing literature on the material culture of experimental life science, Angela Creager traces the history of the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) as a subject of research through the 1960s. Partaking of both the institutional history and the intellectual biography genres, the book is focused on the work of Wendell Stanley, who achieved the first crystallization of a virus with TMV in 1935 while working at the Rockefeller Institute, and who subsequently parlayed his 1946 Nobel Prize in chemistry into a grand new institution for virus biochemistry and biophysics at Berkeley. Based on scientific literature and on Stanley's correspondence and administrative papers, together with those of his sponsors, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), Creager paints a detailed picture of the evolving ways in which Stanley's group used TMV as a "model system." By this term, she means that TMV served both as an exemplary virus whose properties could stand for those of viruses in general, and also as an example of fruitful procedures for investigating other simple organisms, for virology and the budding field now known as "molecular biology."

Art history · Biography · Biology · Environmental ethics · Foundation (evidence) · Library science · Political science · Subject (documents) · Tobacco mosaic virus · Virus · Classics · Computer Science · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Philosophy · Virology