Good question, and it sent me straight to the primary sources.
The word "virus" originally meant poison or toxin in Latin. That meaning held through the early 20th century. The shift toward "discrete replicating organism" happened gradually, and the Stanley story shows how.
Wendell Stanley's 1935 paper was titled: "Isolation of a Crystalline Protein Possessing the Properties of Tobacco-Mosaic Virus." Notice the wording. Properties. Not entity.
His own conclusion: "Tobacco mosaic virus is regarded as an autocatalytic self-reproducing protein which, for the present, may be assumed to require the presence of living cells for multiplication." Requires the presence of living cells. His words.
The Nobel Committee awarded him the 1946 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, not Physiology or Medicine. The citation was for preparing virus proteins in pure form. Chemical work all the way through.
Later, Bawden and Pirie found the crystal also contained RNA, as well as protein. It was a nucleoprotein, not pure protein. That was a chemical refinement. RNA is a chemical molecule. The refinement added detail to Stanley's chemical description. It did not contradict his framework, and it certainly did not introduce an organism.
Stanley described chemical infectious material requiring living cells. The refined version was chemical infectious material containing RNA, still requiring living cells.
The organism narrative was built by others on top of that RNA finding. RNA became "viral genome." That became "the virus's own genetic instructions." That became "a discrete replicating organism with its own genome."
That leap went beyond anything Stanley demonstrated, claimed, or that the RNA finding established. Stanley did not make the organism claim. The field made it for him.
In my framework, pathogen means something that produces a stress response in the cellular environment. My pipeline documented five environmental stressors producing five distinct lncRNA stress signatures.
The sequences labeled viral in the Wuhan and EBV datasets map back to human cellular machinery when the viral database is removed from the search.
That is consistent with what Stanley actually described: host cell processes, chemical material, not an independent organism.
Hi Shan.
In your mind, is a pathogen the same as a 'virus'?
I've heard something these past few years...always stays in the back of my mind.
Made a fresh article about this
https://shanhenry.substack.com/p/when-protein-became-genome-the-stanley?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=15occ5
Hey man! Thanks for reading and replying!
Good question, and it sent me straight to the primary sources.
The word "virus" originally meant poison or toxin in Latin. That meaning held through the early 20th century. The shift toward "discrete replicating organism" happened gradually, and the Stanley story shows how.
Wendell Stanley's 1935 paper was titled: "Isolation of a Crystalline Protein Possessing the Properties of Tobacco-Mosaic Virus." Notice the wording. Properties. Not entity.
His own conclusion: "Tobacco mosaic virus is regarded as an autocatalytic self-reproducing protein which, for the present, may be assumed to require the presence of living cells for multiplication." Requires the presence of living cells. His words.
The Nobel Committee awarded him the 1946 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, not Physiology or Medicine. The citation was for preparing virus proteins in pure form. Chemical work all the way through.
Later, Bawden and Pirie found the crystal also contained RNA, as well as protein. It was a nucleoprotein, not pure protein. That was a chemical refinement. RNA is a chemical molecule. The refinement added detail to Stanley's chemical description. It did not contradict his framework, and it certainly did not introduce an organism.
Stanley described chemical infectious material requiring living cells. The refined version was chemical infectious material containing RNA, still requiring living cells.
The organism narrative was built by others on top of that RNA finding. RNA became "viral genome." That became "the virus's own genetic instructions." That became "a discrete replicating organism with its own genome."
That leap went beyond anything Stanley demonstrated, claimed, or that the RNA finding established. Stanley did not make the organism claim. The field made it for him.
In my framework, pathogen means something that produces a stress response in the cellular environment. My pipeline documented five environmental stressors producing five distinct lncRNA stress signatures.
The sequences labeled viral in the Wuhan and EBV datasets map back to human cellular machinery when the viral database is removed from the search.
That is consistent with what Stanley actually described: host cell processes, chemical material, not an independent organism.