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RALPH W. G. WYCKOFF, Ph.D.

J Am Med Assoc. 1948;136(17):1081-1083.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

Electron microscopes make it possible to see the elementary infectious particles of the smallest viruses and thus to study these hitherto invisible agents of disease in the same general way that bacteria have been studied with optical microscopes. In such a study the first problem that arises, and one that must be successfully met before others can properly be attacked, involves learning to recognize the individual units of virus activity among the masses of tissue and other extraneous material with which they are associated. For this a virus should be available in purified form; otherwise, it is as dangerous to ascribe virus activity to specific objects seen in the microscope as it is to pick some particular organism in a mixed bacterial culture as being responsible for a disease induced by the culture as a whole. Viruses grow only on living matter, and they must therefore usually be separated from . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
Bethesda, Md.

From the National Institute of Health.

Footnotes
Read in the Symposium on Virus Diseases before the Section on Pathology and Physiology at the Ninety-Sixth Annual Session of the American Medical Association, Atlantic City, N.J., June 12, 1947.

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