Dmitri Ivanovsky

Who was Dmitri Ivanovsky?

Dmitri Iosifovich Ivanovsky was a Russian botanist, one of the discoverers of filterable nature of viruses and thus one of the founders of virology.

Ivanovsky studied at the University of St Petersburg in 1887, when he was sent to Ukraine and Bessarabia to investigate a tobacco disease causing a great damage to plantations at the time. Three years later, he was assigned to look into similar disease of tobacco plants, this time raging in the Crimea region. He discovered that both diseases were caused by an extremely minuscule infectious agent, capable of permeating porcelain Chamberland filters, something which bacteria could never do. He described his findings in an article and a dissertation.

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