Just recently I have stumble upon the book ‘The virus: a history of the concept’ by Sally Smiths Hughes at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam library. It was fascinating to see how the viruses came into human awareness as we develop methods to see. The book talks about how scientists encounter the difficulties in researches when only techniques for Bacteriology were available, and how they come up with different hypothesises and modify their tools to observe.
This reminds me of the exhibition ‘The Scientific Eye and Visual Wonders in Edo’ at Suntory Museum in 2014. The invention of microscope and telescope expends our visual understanding of things, where you can see for the first time the texture of the sun, and the details of snowflakes.
Viruses were once called ‘submicroscopic disease agent’ and ‘filterable infectious agent’ when nobody knows the physicality of viruses and all there can be observed is through filtering the samples which will be able to remove the bacteria. All these were happened around late 19th century to early 20th century. The observation and discovery of viruses is through a series of actions / experiments conducted through diseases for the sake that it is easier to observe. And perhaps this also contribute to the general perception that viruses indicates ‘diseases’.
In the last 10 years, the revolution of genetic sequencing has allowed fields like metagenomics to appear. Metagenomics allows us to observe directly at the genetic informations that are carried by DNA and RNA, omitting the traditional way of observation that requires the pairing between genetic information and directly observable functions. Therefore researches around beneficial viruses start to appear. Perhaps it is the time for us to move from pro-biotics to pro-virome?