Afew decades ago, Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) robots, DNA sequencers, and high-speed computers fostered and accompanied quite a scientific revolution in virology. Acknowledging this radical change, some illustrious scholars alerted their scientific community on a hazardous drift away from investigating the viral ecology, pathogenesis, and disease potential, along with viral identification by testing. “In summary”, wrote Calisher and al. (2001),
remarkable advances in molecular genetics have allowed rapid and precise identifications of viruses and of their genomes; however, such characterizations thus far can provide only limited information about the phenotype and disease potential of a virus.Their position paper was noticed and its lead author, Professor Charles H. Calisher, was interviewed by Science (Enserink 2001):
Thanks to techniques such as PCR and sequencing, diagnostic labs everywhere can perform high -sensitivity tests for a battery of viruses in a matter of hours. […] Although all that is terrific, says Calisher, a string of DNA letters in a data bank tells little or nothing about how a virus multiplies, which animals carry it, how it makes people sick, or whether antibodies to other viruses might protect against it. Just studying sequences, Calisher says, is “like trying to say whether somebody has bad breath by looking at his fingerprint.”The fundamental issue raised by Calisher et al. (2001) was that, without complementing genomic testing with phenotypic and epidemiologic information, “it will be much harder to understand and fight the next dangerous virus that comes along” (Enserink 2001). In other words, ‘miasma’ and ‘germ’ theories should go along together, complementing each other.
