UMN Virology Timeline

University of Minnesota

• 1936: John Bittner discovers the "Bittner milk agent", which causes mammary cancer in mice, while working at the Jackson Labs in Bar Harbor, Maine (Science 84:162). Bittner would continue his research at the University of Minnesota and help to prove the virus etiology of the disease - mouse mammary tumor virus (MMTV). This was one of the first cancer-causing viruses discovered.

• Virology Worldwide
  

• Crystallization of tomato bushy stunt virus by Bawden and Pirie.
• Yellow fever vacine tests successful. (Theiler, 1939).
• Bacteriophage one step growth curve (Ellis and Delbruck).

• World Events
  

• 1933: Four years after the start of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected and creates the New Deal.
• 1937: Japan attacks China, beginning the Second World War.
• In 1939, Germany invades Poland.
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University of Minnesota

• 1941: John Bittner and colleagues show that MMTV can be cryopreserved (Science 93:527-528).
• 1944: Bittner and colleagues show that hormones influence cancer development (Science 99:83-85) and show the pH and temperature sensitivity of MMTV (Science 100:575-576).
• 1945: John Bittner and colleagues show that MMTV can be transferred between mice and can be grown in chick embryos (Science 101:95-97).

• Virology Worldwide
  

• Tomato bushy stunt virus and tobacco mosaic virus show clear X-ray diffraction patterns (Bernal & Fankuchen, 1941).
• An X-ray diffraction pattern is obtained on a single crystal of necrosis virus (Crowfoot & Schmidt, 1945).
• Enders, Weller and Robbins culture poliovirus in human embryonic tissues, 1949.

• World Events
  

• 1945: successful test of the atomic bomb, which is used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 1945: The end of the Second World War
• 1947: The beginning of the Cold War
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University of Minnesota

• 1952: Jerome Syverton propagates poliovirus in monkey and human cells in cell culture. J. Exp. Med. 96:355-367.
• 1959: John J. Holland conducts fundamental experiments on the nature of poliovirus replication (J Exp Med 109:475-485 & 109:487-504). Later, Holland will move to UCSD and become a leader in RNA virus quasispecies theory.
• 1959: John J. Holland, Leroy McClaren and Jerome T. Syverton show that poliovirus nucleic acid can be used to infect nonsusceptible cells. (J Exp Med.110:65-80).

• Virology Worldwide
  

• Discovery of transduction by bacteriophage (Zinder & Lederberg, 1952).
• X-ray diffraction patterns of TBSV show high degree of symmetry (Caspar, 1956).
• Infectivity of TMV RNA reported by Frankel-Conrat and Gierer in 1956.
• Interferon discovered by Isaacs and Lindenmann, 1957.
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  World Events
  

• 1953: The death of Joseph Stalin
• 1954: Brown vs. the Board of Education begins desegregation in the public schools.
• 1956: Nationalization of the Suez canal precipitates the Suez Crisis.
• 1957: Sputnik launched.
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University of Minnesota

• 1966: Bacteriophage phi29 is identified by Bernard Reilly and Dwight Anderson from soil sample obtained on St. Paul Campus (J Bacteriol. 1966 May; 91(5): 2081-2089).
• 1966: Peter Plagemann develops methods to propagate lactate dehydrogenase-elevating virus in cell culture.

• Virology Worldwide

• First deciphering of the genetic code, Nirenberg and Matthaei, 1961.
• Principles of icosahedral virus structure are published by Caspar and Klug in 1962.
• Polio RNA shown to be translated from a single initiation site and proteolytically processed (Summers & Maizel, Jr, 1968; Jacobson and Baltimore, 1968).

• World Events

• 1963: Assasination of President John F. Kennedy.
• March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom helps pass the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the National Voting Rights Act (1965).
• 1964: Escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, following a slow build-up from 1954.
• Assassination of Malcolm X.
• 1968: A year of many globally-significant events, among them the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Prague Spring movement and the Tet Offensive.
  

University of Minnesota

• 1977: Anthony Faras and colleagues describe the R regions of retroviral DNA Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1977 June; 74(6): 2389-2393).
• 1978: Ashley Haase begins the use of in situ hybridization for the analysis of lentiviral infections which he will later continue at the University of Minnesota. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1978 Dec;75(12):6125-9).

• Virology Worldwide
  

• Discovery of reverse transcriptase (Baltimore, 1970; Temin & Mizutani, 1970).
• Structure of tomato bushy stunt virus at 2.8 angstroms resolution (Harrison et al., 1970).
  

  World Events
  

• 1974: In Chile, Pinochet leads coup deposing Salvador Allende; Pinochet will rule until 1990.
• 1974: Nixon resigns.
• 1975: The end of the Vietnam war.
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University of Minnesota

• 1984: Anthony Faras and colleagues show the cellular transformation of human papillomavirus in vitro (Science. 1984 Aug 10;225(4662):634-6).
• 1987: ph29 pRNA is discovered by Dwight Anderson and colleagues (Science. 1987 May 8;236(4802):690-4).
• 1988: Robert Vince and collaborators publish an article describing the anti-HIV activity of carbovir (Biochem Biophys Res Commun. 1988 Oct 31;156(2):1046-53).

• Virology Worldwide
  

• Structure of southern bean mosaic virus at 2.8 angstroms (Abad-Zapatero et al, 1980).
• Founding of the American Society for Virology, 1981.
• Identification of HIV as the cause of AIDS, 1983.
• Structure of the common cold virus published (Rossman et al, 1985).

  World Events
  

• 1986: Iran-Contra scandal becomes public knowledge.
• 1989: The fall of the Berlin Wall.
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University of Minnesota

• 1990: Ashley Haase and colleagues develop the methods for PCR amplification and detection of lentiviral DNA inside cells (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1990 Jul;87(13):4971-5).
• 1993: Ashley Haase and colleagues discover high levels of HIV replication in solid lymph tissue (Nature. 1993 Mar 25;362(6418):359-62).
• 1996: Perry Hackett proposes that Rous sarcoma virus Gag expression can regulate whether retroviral RNA is translated or packaged into virus particles (J Virol. 1996 Oct;70(10):6642-52).
• 1997: Discovery of the elimination of HIV-1 from secondary lymphoid tissue reservoir during anti-retroviral therapy by Ashley Haase and colleagues (Science. 1997 May 9;276(5314):960-4).
• 1997: Perry Hackett and colleagues reconstruct the Sleeping Beauty transposon from fish (Cell. 1997 Nov 14;91(4):501-10).
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  Virology Worldwide
  

• First (approved) human gene therapy procedure was carried out in 1990 on a child with severe combined immune deficiency (SCID), using a retrovirus vector. Although not successful, this was the first attempt to correct human genetic disease.
• Through the nineties, the number of confirmed cases of people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide reaches 33 million. The AIDS pandemic continues to grow. Confirmed cases are an underestimate of the true total worldwide.
• 1999: Nucleotide sequence of the largest known virus genome completed: Paramecium bursaria Chlorella virus 1. This 330,742 bp sequence represents the technical advances in sequencing which have occurred since the first genome sequence was completed in 1977.
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  World Events
  

• 1990: The first Gulf War.
• 1991: The collapse of the Soviet Union.
• 1992: Bill Clinton is elected president; late in his administration, Clinton doubles the NIH budget.
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University of Minnesota

• 2001: Measurement of phi29 motor strength by Dwight Anderson, Carlos Bustamante and colleagues (Nature. 2001 Oct 18;413(6857):748-52).
• 2003: Peter Plagemann hypothesizes that a mutant closely related to lactate dehydrogenase-elevating virus, an arterivirus of mice, infected wild boars in Europe and is the origin of PRRSV in domestic pigs (Emerg Infect Dis. 2003 Aug;9(8):903-8).
  
• 2003: Institute for Molecular Virology founded.

• Virology Worldwide
  

• Development of hepatitis C infectious clones.
• Worldwide, over 40 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS
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  World Events
  

• 2001: September 11 attacks on the United States.
• 2003: Beginning of the second Gulf War in a climate of global controversy.