- How did Rous prove that something smaller than a cell was responsible for the hen's tumor?
- Why was the idea of a cancer-causing infectious agent so foreign to medical orthodoxy in 1909?
- How long did it take for Rous's discovery to be recognized with a Nobel Prize, and why the delay?
Virology
The study of viruses and viral disease.
- What were the clear plaques d'Hérelle noticed in his bacterial cultures, and why didn't he dismiss them as contamination?
- Why did d'Hérelle conclude that bacteriophages were viruses that hunted bacteria specifically?
- Why did phage therapy survive in Soviet Georgia while falling out of use in the West after antibiotics arrived?
- How is d'Hérelle's century-old discovery being reconsidered today as bacteria grow resistant to antibiotics?
- How did scientists eventually recover material to study the origins of the 1918 flu virus nearly a century later?
- What other proteins did Northrop and Stanley crystallize to reinforce Sumner's original claim?
- How did Max Theiler weaken the yellow fever virus by passing it through mouse brains and chick embryos?
- How did a kitchen blender help prove that DNA, not protein, carries hereditary information?
- What earlier discovery by Peyton Rous took fifty years to be fully vindicated by later research?
- How did Peyton Rous's 1911 experiment with filtered chicken tumour extract demonstrate that a virus could cause cancer?
- Why was Rous's viral theory of cancer dismissed by the medical establishment for decades before it was accepted?
- Why did bacteriophages become the model organism for early molecular biology?
- What did Hershey's 1952 blender experiment actually demonstrate?
- What does reverse transcriptase do, and why did its discovery upset molecular biology's rules?
- How did Renato Dulbecco show that tumour viruses insert their DNA into a host chromosome?
- Why does understanding reverse transcriptase matter for treating HIV?
- Why do bacteria have enzymes that cut up viral DNA at specific sites in the first place?
- How did Daniel Nathans use restriction enzymes to build the first genetic map of a DNA molecule?
- What did Klug's method reveal about the structure of tobacco mosaic virus and transfer RNA?
- What tissue did Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier use to isolate the retrovirus that would later be renamed HIV?
- What did Peyton Rous's 1911 chicken tumour experiments suggest about the origin of cancer-causing genes?
- What did Roberts and Sharp find when they compared adenovirus RNA transcripts to the final RNA reaching the ribosome?
- How did Mark Ptashne show that repressor proteins control bacteriophage lambda's choice to kill or lie dormant?
- What evidence did Harald zur Hausen find that linked human papillomavirus, rather than herpes, to cervical cancer?
- How did Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier isolate the retrovirus that would be confirmed as HIV?
- What four genetic lineages combined to produce the 2009 H1N1 reassortant virus?
- What is phage display, and how does it let researchers find peptides that bind a specific target?
- How did Michael Houghton clone the genome of the hepatitis C virus without ever growing it in a dish?