Dmitry Ivanovsky

Dmitry Iosifovich Ivanovsky was a Russian botanist, plant physiologist, and microbiologist who made the foundational discovery of virology, discovering an entire invisible kingdom of submicroscopic pathogens. Educated at Saint Petersburg University under Andrei Famintsyn, Ivanovsky was dispatched by the Free Economic Society in 1887 to investigate a mysterious disease devastating Crimean tobacco plantations.

In 1892, Ivanovsky crushed infected tobacco leaves and passed the sap through an unglazed porcelain Chamberland-Pasteur filter whose microscopic pores were guaranteed to trap all known bacteria. When the filtered fluid remained infectious and caused mosaic disease in healthy tobacco plants, Ivanovsky realized that an infectious agent existed that was infinitely smaller than any bacteria. In his historic February 1892 paper presented to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, he documented the first evidence of what Martinus Beijerinck later named a virus (the Tobacco Mosaic Virus, TMV). Ivanovsky went on to serve as professor at the University of Warsaw and Rostov.