Adolf Mayer

Adolf Mayer (1843 to 1942) was a German agricultural biologist whose work on tobacco mosaic disease played an important role in the discovery of tobacco mosaic virus and of viruses in general. Born at Oldenburg into the family of a high school teacher, he studied biology, geology and chemistry at Karlsruhe and Heidelberg and took a doctorate in biology at Heidelberg in 1864. In 1879, while director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at Wageningen in the Netherlands, he was asked by Dutch farmers to study a disease of the tobacco plant. In 1886 he published a paper naming it mosaic disease of tobacco and describing its symptoms, and he showed that sap from diseased plants could infect healthy ones. He found no fungi or bacteria under the microscope and concluded wrongly that the agent was a kind of bacterium, and later workers, among them Dmitry Ivanovsky and Martinus Beijerinck, repeated the filtration experiments.