Where is the field of virology headed?
Varmus: One thing that’s happened in the last 20 years that really was unprecedented was the development of drugs that worked to treat viral illness. The idea of using protease inhibitors to counter viral infections had the earliest success with HIV. Now there is reason to believe that people are hot on the trail of developing protease inhibitors for the treatment of hepatitis C. That would be a tremendous advance, because hepatitis C is a virus that is still very difficult to grow. One of the (other) things we’ve learned is how to work with viruses that can’t even be grown in tissue culture. That seems paradoxical, but we know enough about how to study viral genomes, and pull them apart so we can understand how parts of them work without having to grow the whole genome. Baltimore: It occurred to me many years ago that … if you could modify the genetic inheritance of the cell, you could put into the cell something which could in principle totally prevent a virus from growing. There is
