Martinus Willem BeijerinckBorn 16 Mar 1851; died 1 Jan 1931 at age 79. Dutch botanist whowas one of the first microbiologists to recognize the importance of lactic acid bacteria for food production. Hecontributed to agriculture, botany, microbiology, chemistry and genetics. In research on gall wasps and the formation of galls (1882) he laid groundwork for the theory of ontogeny in higher plants and animals whereby growth enzymes act in series in a fixed order (1917). Since his father was a tobacco dealer who went bankrupt, he researched the tobacco mosaic virus, which causes a disease of tobacco plants with serious economic impact. He discovered that even after filtering the sap of an infected plant to remove bacteria, the liquid was still able to carry infection to another plant. Thus he knew the disease was not due to bacteria, but by something else in the the liquid, which he called a filterable virus (from Latin word for poison) but which later researchers demonstrated in fact had a particle form.« |
