Dutch botanist

Born in Amsterdam, Martinus Willem Beijerinck was the son of a tobacco dealer who went bankrupt. In response to his father's misfortune, Beijerinck would devote most of his scientific career to the tobacco mosaic virus, a pathogen causing an economically devastating disease that dwarfs tobacco plants and mottles their leaves.

Beijerinck, who graduated from the Delft Polytechnic School, began his research under the assumption that the tobacco mosaic disease was caused by an unidentified bacterium or a parasite. Attempting to isolate the causative agent, Beijerinck filtered the sap of an infected plant to remove all known bacteria; however, the resulting liquid was still infective. In addition, the filtered substance was capable of infecting another plant, which could infect another, demonstrating that the substance had the ability...