Timeline of Discovery
- 1908: Oluf Bang and Vilhelm Ellerman, University of Copenhagen, first demonstrated that avian sarcoma leukosis virus could be transmitted after cell-free filtration to new chickens, causing leukemia.
- 1910: Peyton Rous at Rockefeller extended Bang and Ellerman's experiments to show filtrable cell-free transmission of a solid tumor sarcoma to chickens. The reasons why chickens are so receptive to such transmission may involve unusual characteristics of stability or instability as they relate to endogenous retroviruses.
- 1933: Richard Edwin Shope discovered cottontail rabbit papillomavirus or Shope papillomavirus, the first mammalian tumor virus.
- 1936: Mouse mammary tumor virus shown by John J. Bittner to be an "extrachromosomal factor" (i.e., virus) transmitted among laboratory strains of mice by breast feeding. This was an extension of work on murine breast cancer caused by a transmissible agent as early as 1915, by A.F. Lathrop and L. Loeb.
- 1957: Sarah Stewart and Berenice Eddy discovered polyoma virus
- 1954: Ludwik Gross, working at the Bronx VA medical center isolated murine polyomavirus causing a variety of salivary gland and other tumors in specific strains of newborn mice. This was not widely appreciated until the results were confirmed by scientists at NIH reproducing the experiments under the same conditions.
- 1961: Simian Vacuolating virus 40 (SV40) discovered by Eddy at NIH, and Hillman and Sweet at Merck laboratory as a rhesus macaque virus contaminating cells used to make of Salk and Sabin polio vaccines. Several years later it was shown to cause cancer in Syrian hamsters, raising alarm that persists today. Scientific consensus now strongly agrees that this is not likely to cause human cancer although the controversy still persists.
Read more about this topic: Oncovirus
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“That the discovery of this great truth, which lies so near and obvious to the mind, should be attained to by the reason of so very few, is a sad instance of the stupidity and inattention of men, who, though they are surrounded with such clear manifestations of the Deity, are yet so little affected by them, that they seem as it were blinded with excess of light.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)