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versy regarding some of the rules, which developed into a serious rift between most of the plant virologists, and some animal virologists." He comments on Fenner's presidency of the ICTV from 1970 to 1976: |
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In retrospect perhaps the major contribution made by Fenner during his Presidency was to keep the plant virologists working within the ICTV organization. This really meant stopping the insistence of Lwoff's supporters on an hierarchical classification and Latinized binomials, and also, as noted above, deleting the rule regarding new sigla. In addition Fenner exerted pressure to ensure that following two vertebrate virologists, a plant virologist should be the next president of the ICTV. (Matthews 1983, 20) |
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Murphy notes that even today: "Virus taxonomy is a polarizing subject when it comes up in hallway conversations"; he goes on to praise the ICTV for its work of: |
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true international consensus building, and true pragmatismand it has been successful. The work of the Committee has been published in a series of reports, the Reports of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, The Classification and Nomenclature of Viruses. These Reports have become part of the history and infrastructure of modern virology. (Murphy et al. 1995, v) |
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We see then that the development of the classification system also constructs the community for which that system will act as information infrastructure. The system is built as a political compromise between specialties. The kinds of truth and the kinds of stories that it can contain by their nature recognize this. |
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As Murphy says, the resulting classification system is in some senses arbitrary: |
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Today, there is a sense that a significant fraction of all existing viruses of humans, domestic animals, and economically important plants have already been isolated and entered into the taxonomic system. . . . [The] present universal system of virus taxonomy is useful and usable. It is set arbitrarily at hierarchical levels of order, family, subfamily, genus, and species. Lower hierarchical levels, such as subspecies, strain, variant, and so forth, are established by international specialty groups and by culture collections. (Murphy et al. 1995, 2) |
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The apposition of specialty groups (professionalization work) and culture collections (naturalization work) is unsurprising; Murphy offers it in a different form later in the same work: "Unambiguous virus identification is a major virtue of the universal system of taxonomy . . . and of particular value when the editor of a journal requires precise naming of viruses cited in a publication" (Murphy et al. 1995, 7). |
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