Interactions between pox viruses

Abstract

In recent years several distinguished virologists who have delivered this lecture have expressed doubts about the validity of including viruses among van Leeuwenhoek’s ‘animalicules’. I share their doubts, but justify my presence here on the grounds that microscopy of a relatively sophisticated type has played a considerable part in the elucidation of several of the problems I will discuss today; and Leeuwenhoek was primarily a microscopist, interested in the fine structure of all natural objects. My predecessors among the animal virologists have ranged over such broad fields as ‘The place of viruses in nature’, ‘Virus-host cell interactions’ and ‘The dynamics of viral functions’. I have chosen a more limited topic, the interactions between pox viruses, and I will preface my account of this with a brief survey of the present state of knowledge of the pox-virus group and the growth cycle of the prototype virus, vaccinia, in cultured cells.