Adolf Mayer

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Adolf Mayer (1843 – 1942) was director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at Wageningen in the Netherlands. He was called in 1879 to study a peculiar disease of tobacco. He is credited as the first person to transmit tobacco mosaic virus by using the juice extracts from the diseased plant as the inoculum to infect other plants. At the time viruses were undiscovered, and the disease was thought to be spread by very small bacteria or toxins, though later experiments by scientists such as Ivanowsky, Beijerinck and Stanley showed this was not the case.

He published a paper in 1886 describing the disease and its symptoms in detail.

Notable facts - Dietrich 'Adolf' Mayer began his career in Germany in the province of Armein working as an underfunded independent scientist. After significant advances in virology, he dropped his first name and went by the now infamous Adolf (of Nazi fame). He is considered one of the fathers of modern virology.