III. The Discovery of Retroviruses

 From A Brief Chronicle of Retrovirology at the National Library of Medicine.

This began in 1908, when "the Danish physician-veterinarian team of Vilhelm Ellermann and Oluf Bang showed that chicken leukosis, a form of leukemia and of lymphoma, was caused by a virus."

As we know, DNA viruses (or DNA versions of viruses) affect us by getting sections of DNA transcribed into RNA and translated into amino acids, that actually do the dirty work of giving us diseases.

This process (transcription followed by translation) was once dubbed, tonge-in-cheek, by Rosalind Franklin  James Watson and Francis Crick as the "central Dogma of biology", as it seemed to basically explain all biological processes. 

Abstract from 

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27482900/

In 1970 the independent and simultaneous discovery of reverse transcriptase in retroviruses (then RNA tumor viruses) by David Baltimore and Howard Temin revolutionized molecular biology and laid the foundations for retrovirology and cancer biology. In this historical review we describe the formulation of the controversial provirus hypothesis by Temin, which ultimately was proven by his discovery of reverse transcriptase in Rous sarcoma virus virions. Baltimore arrived at the same discovery through his studies on replication of RNA-containing viruses, starting with poliovirus and then moving to vesicular stomatitis virus, where he discovered a virion RNA polymerase. Subsequent studies of reverse transcriptase led to the elucidation of the mechanism of retrovirus replication, the discovery of oncogenes, the advent of molecular cloning, the search for human cancer viruses, and the discovery and treatment of HIV/AIDS.

 

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