Kary Mullis ? I had no idea who this person was and look over the Internet.. Now I understand the interest (and my nose feels it ;) ). I am looking forward to read your next post about him, curious about what you want to say.

I really enjoyed reading this post, especially how the differences between viruses and bacteria emerged (and actually stayed hidden for so long). Really really cool (well, if this word can be used in this context ;) )!

I usually write my questions and comments all during the course of my reading. When you mentioned that viruses were invisible and cannot be seen with microscopes, I was really puzzled and assumed that this was the case in the 19^th century (plus the first half of the 20^th). I had however troubles to conceive this was still the case today, as we have good techniques to unravel the nano-world. And then you killed my question when you mentioned electronic microscopes. This being said, is there any more recent observations with very modern microscopes such as those used every day in nanoscience research?