Virology Quotes

There are people who study germs. I believe they are called Germans

Jonas Salk showed that a killed virus vaccine would work and would be damned effective in fighting disease. This was something that virologists of the day pooh-poohed. And Salk proved them wrong.

My lab used to do gene expression and genomics, and we did a lot of sequencing samples from virus outbreaks.

As mechanistic biologists, we are hoping that by understanding how the virus works at the molecular level, we will be able to predict with more accuracy how it will evolve.

This year, 1996, has been designated the 'Year of the Vaccine,' commemorating the 200th anniversary of Edward Jenner's vaccination of James Phipps with cowpox virus and subsequent challenge with smallpox virus. Insight into the nature of viruses, and how viruses interact with mammalian cells, has evolved since the turn of the century.

It's true that my research expertise is in biology: for example, the Ebola virus, the Marburg virus, and monkey pox, and not bacteriology as in the case of the anthrax organism. It's also true that I have never, ever worked with anthrax in my life. It's a separate field from the research I was performing at Fort Detrick.

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

Different viral species contain nucleic acids that differ not only in length and nucleotide sequence but in many unexpected ways as well.

As an undergraduate majoring in biology at the University of California, San Diego, I worked on infectious diseases at the nearby Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

In San Francisco, I found Warren Levinson, who had set up a program to study Rous Sarcoma Virus, an archetype for what we now call retroviruses. At the time, the replication of retroviruses was one of the great puzzles of animal virology. Levinson, Levintow and I joined forces in the hope of solving that puzzle.

I think I first encountered Ebola from the movie 'Outbreak.' Then there was the book 'The Hot Zone.' It's the type of thing you either read and say, 'Oh wow, that's terrifying,' or you read it and say, 'Oh wow, I want to do that.' I read it and said, 'Oh wow, I want do that.'

As long as we do not know how the cell works, we don't know the kind of havoc the AIDS virus creates in the cell.

I decided to do graduate studies in virology at Stanford University in California because it had a hospital, which made working on clinical applications easier.