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International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) so as to see how diseases that present differently in each individual and often vertiginously mutate can be usefully classified. |
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Throughout the history of virology, there have been acerbic debates over just what are viruses. The great virologist Lwoff declaimed in 1953 that, ''viruses should be considered as viruses because viruses are viruses" (Matthews 1983: 7). Viruses themselves have moved from scientific category to category. In the early twentieth century, the central definition of a virus was entirely negative: as Waterson and Wilkinson (1978, 1718) note, a virus was any disease organism that could be filtered through one of the 'filter candles' developed for the purpose. This was a useful definition in that it excluded all other known disease agents; however, it did not guarantee the homogeneity of the category itself. As Andrewes noted in 1930, when describing animal viruses: "judgment must be suspended . . . in the case of the invisible viruses or so-called 'filter-passing' organisms. Here our ignorance is almost complete; they are possibly a heterogeneous group but in the case of creatures that we cannot see and whose very existence is, in many cases, a matter of inference only, it is idle to talk of classification in the usual sense" (Matthews 1983, 4). So there was no one definition, or rather, the ultimate encompassing residual category. Here be dragons. |
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Equally, there was no one discipline studying the matter of virus classification. There was no study of virology per se until the 1980s. There was an a priori assumption, entrenched in disciplinary specialties, that animal and plant viruses were not the same. This was disproved in the 1940s when it was shown that some plant viruses could also affect insects (Matthews 1983, 7). Groups who were not used to working together were forced to cooperateand they did not necessarily like it. As with the numerous and passionate battles between cladistics and numerical taxonomy in biology (Duncan and Stuessy 1984), there were a series of virulent virological arguments that have left their traces in the literature. The arguments can be read in two ways. They are simultaneously about a struggle for professional authority on the parts of the various disciplines involved and an attempt to find a single language with which to talk about the complex temporal and spatial properties of viruses. |
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The role of the classification systems in knitting together (or not) the specialties is clear in all accounts of virus taxonomy. Matthews (1983, 13) notes: "in the period 1966 to 1970 there was considerable contro- |
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