The Founder of virology

Dmitry losiphovitch Ivanovsky, 1864–1920) was a Russian botanist, the first man to discover viruses (1892) and thus one of the founders of virology.
Ivanovsky studied at the University of St Petersburg under Andrei Famintsyn in 1887, when he was sent to Ukraine and Bessarabia to investigate a tobacco disease causing great damage to plantations located there at the time.

To prove this phenomenon D. I. Ivanovsky had to make many experiments on various plants. He had to pass the juice of the diseased plant through a fine filter which could catch the smallest bacteria. At that time everybody considered that bacteria were the smallest living organisms. But when D.I. Ivanovsky had completed to pass the living organisms smaller than bacteria existed plants to healthy ones they became infected.

Before D. I. Ivanovsky nobody had been able to prove the existence of viruses. Dmitry Iosiphovish Ivanovsky was the first scientist who able to establish the new branch of microbiology-virology. He described his findings in an article (1892) and a dissertation (1902).

In 1898, the Dutch microbiologist Martinus Beijerinck repeated Ivanovsky's experiments and became convinced that the filtered solution contained a new form of infectious agent, which he named virus.

The list of the used literature:
L.S.Plebeyskaya, Z.I. Winestein. “Essential English for Medical Students”.
http://z-u-r.narod.ru/