While the middle years of the twentieth century saw the development of antibiotics, potent new weapons against bacterial diseases, no such chemical defenses against viral diseases had yet emerged other than a few anti-viral vaccines. This was and continues to be a significant gap, since more than half of the communicable diseases that affect human beings are caused by ribonucleic acid (RNA) viruses. The first step was to find out how the body protected itself against viruses; it was known that antibodies acted only against bacteria. That step was taken by Alick Isaacs, a Scottish virologist, in 1957.

Isaacs was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1921, to a Russian Jewish family. He studied medicine at Glasgow University but found he preferred research to the actual practice of medicine. Accordingly, he pursued graduate studies in bacteriology at Glasgow and secured fellowships to research influenza with eminent microbiologists Stuart Harris of England...