Scientist of the Day - Martinus Beijerinck
Tobacco leaf infected with tobacco mosaic virus (Wikimedia commons)
Martinus Beijerinck, a Dutch microbiologist, was born Mar. 16, 1851. Louis Pasteur demonstrated in the 1860s that some diseases are caused by microorganisms, or bacteria. In the ensuing 30 years, many new bacteria were identified, and new tools were developed to aid in the study of bacteria, including filtration systems that could filter out bacteria and allow them to be cultured and identified. In the years leading up to 1898, Beijerinck was investigating a plant infection known as tobacco mosaic disease, so called because affected plants (tobacco but many others as well) developed a mosaic pattern of blight on their leaves (first image).
Martinus Beijerinck at work in his Delft laboratory, 1921 (Wikimedia commons)
Beijerinck found that when he tried to filter out the infectious agent, the cake (the material that was caught by the filter) would not pass on the disease, but the filtrate – the solution that passes through the filter – was infectious. The infectious agent was apparently smaller – a lot smaller – than a bacterium. Beijerinck called it a virus. Although two other people before him did similar filtration experiments on tobacco mosaic disease with similar results – the filtrate was infectious – Beijerinck is the one usually credited as the being the founder of virology, because he concluded that the infectious agent was a completely new kind of entity, not just a small bacterium, and because he named it a virus. However, it took a while to realize that a virus is particulate – Beijerinck thought for years that a virus might be a liquid. Not until 1935 was the tobacco mosaic virus crystalized, demonstrating its particulate nature, and earning the crystallizer a share of a Nobel Prize, something Beijerinck might have earned himself, had he waited for the Nobel prizes to be established.
The former home of the Laboratory of Microbiology at Delft University of Technology, founded by Martinus Beijerinck, and where he discovered viruses in 1898 (Wikimedia commons)
Beijerinck lived and worked in Delft in the Netherlands and founded the Delft School of Microbiology (third image), where he worked until his retirement in 1921. The photo of Beijerinck at work in his Delft laboratory (second image) was taken the year he retired.
Since I am a historian and have no firsthand expertise in microbiology, it is Beijerinck's Delft connection that interests me. For if Beijerinck is the father of virology and founder of the Delft school of microbiology, the true father of microbiology grew up and worked in the same city of Delft, and that was Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. It was in 1675 that Leeuwenhoek put a drop of marsh water at the focal point of his single-lens microscope and spied little "animalcules", as he called them, ciliating about in their aqueous milieu. He made a drawing, sent it off to the Royal Society of London with an explanation, and when they printed his drawing in 1676, microbiology was truly born. It would be almost two centuries before anyone realized that his animalcules were infectious agents, and microbiology had to be founded all over again.
A View of Delft, by Johannes Vemeer, oil on canvas, 1659-60, Mauritshuis, The Hague (wga.hu)
Leeuwenhoek’s Delft was captured on canvas by the great Johannes Vermeer (fourth image). In a post on Vermeer, we discussed the possibility that Vermeer had included portraits of Leeuwenhoek in two of his paintings. It is too bad that, as far as we know, no contemporary Dutch painter of Vermeer-like stature attempted a portrait of Beijerinck. Of course, if one had, it would probably have looked something like this.
William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.
