A Tale of Two Viruses

Sankaran masterfully transcribes her infectious enthusiasm for her subject, underpinned by a thorough mastery of archival material as well as a great respect for the available historiography. . . . A Tale of Two Viruses provides an excellent illustration of the narrative possibilities of Plutarchian parallel case studies. It will, hopefully, encourage similar explorations across the history of biology and the history of science and technology more widely.

Sankaran’s book illuminates pioneering discoveries of viruses, genes, and the nature of cancer, from the perspective of both the volatile and dogged researchers. A Tale of Two Viruses will delight biologists, sociologists, historians, and all others who wonder how scientific progress is made.

A Tale of Two Viruses is an ideal introduction for the reader interested in understanding the early 20th-century problems and progress in virology. This narrative is well written, providing biologists and budding virologists a gateway to understand the early and fascinating approaches used to study these (then) invisible agents of disease . . . a first-rate précis of the field.

Inspired in its title by Dickens’ moving A Tale of Two Cities and in its subtitle by Plutarch’s classic (Parallel) Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, A Tale of Two Viruses is a clever attempt to approach the history of viruses in a more interesting way than that presumably afforded by focusing on a single virus, virologist, or viral disease, as other books often do. Indeed, this dual, inevitably comparative and timely history of two viruses—a tumour virus and a bacterial virus or phage—greatly enriches our understanding of viruses as model organisms, which are uniquely positioned to illuminate the long intriguing boundaries between living and non-living, health and disease or benign and malignant tumours.

Neeraja Sankaran has written a splendid book for those interested in the history of virology. Her careful comparison of early work on bacterial viruses and cancer viruses illuminates two important and intertwined strands of twentieth-century biological research. A Tale of Two Viruses will appeal not only to historians and sociologists of science but also to those working in the biomedical sciences.

Sankaran has written a meticulous and fascinating book that offers new insight into twentieth-century discoveries about two seemingly distinct groups of viruses, ultimately revealing how we arrived at the present-day concept of the virus. As a tumor virologist, I gained much from her comparative approach, which is illuminating and novel to historical writing on virology.

A Tale of Two Viruses offers a lively comparative account of research on bacterial viruses and on Rous sarcoma virus. Neeraja Sankaran’s dual portrait both corrects existing biases about the history of bacteriophage and shows how studies of phage were connected to research on other viruses, including in the contested field of cancer research, and long before molecular biologists themselves turned to tumor viruses after the late 1950s. Original and illuminating.

A Tale of Two Viruses is a well-researched exploration of foundational ideas and experimental findings in the first half of the twentieth century. It also has an extensive bibliography, which is an additional, useful resource for those engaging with the historical analysis of developments in virology.