The Construction of Bacteriophage as Bacterial Virus: Linking Endogenous and Exogenous Thought Styles TON VAN HELVOORT Department of Health Ethics and Philosophy University of Limburg P.O. Box 616 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands IS BACTERIOPHAGE A BACTERIAL VIRUS? The 1950s were a "Golden Age" for the research of viruses, a period that witnessed the establishment of virology as an inde- pendent scientific domain. In 1939 the German Archiv fiir die gesamte Virusforschung (continued as Archives of Virology) was the first journal that explicitly addressed virus research. In 1953 the annual serial Advances in Virus Research was started, followed by a number of new periodicals: Virology (1955), Voprosy Virusologii (1956), Acta Virologica (1957), Progress in Medical Virology (1958), and Perspectives in Virology (1959). ~ On the one hand, this was doubtless a consequence of the "explosive" growth of scientific research in general that occurred after World War II. 2 On the other hand, it illustrated the growth of consensus about a 1. See "History and Scope of Virology," in Robin Nicholas and David Nicholas, Virology: An Information Profile (London: Mansell, 1983), pp. 3-20. Although a Swiss-Austrian initiative at the eve of World War II, the Archiv fiir die gesamte Virusforschung was an international enterprise in collaboration with Samuel P. Bedson (London), Jame~ Craigie (Toronto), Andr6 Grafia (Liege), Curt Hallauer (Bern), Richard E. Shope (Princeton), Kenneth M. Smith (Cambridge), Wendell M; Stanley (Princeton), W. J. Tulloch (Dundee), and O. Waldmann (Insel Riems). For the historiography and development of viroiogy see Robert Doerr, "Die Entwicklung der Virusforschung und ihre Problematik," in Handbueh der Virusforschung: Erste Hiilfte, ed. Robert Doerr and Curt Hallauer (Vienna: Julius Springer, 1938), pp. 1-125; "An Historical Introduction to Animal Virology," in F. Macfarlane Burnet, Principles of Animal Virology (New York: Academic Press, 1955), pp. 1-32; Sally S. Hughes, The Virus: A History of the Concept (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1977); Anthony P. Waterson and Lise Wilkinson, An Introduction to the History of Virology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 2. See, for instance, Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science... and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 27, no. 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 91-139. 9 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.