| Abstract |
On June 15, 1964, Dr. Bunsiti Simizu from the Department of Microbiology
of the Chiba University School of Medicine in Chiba, Japan arrived as a
visiting fellow to work with Dr. Ned Wiebenga in the Laboratory of
Tropical Virology (LTV), at the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Simizu brought with
him several seed cultures of passage (P) 93 of the continuous cell line
designated Vero. Vero was initiated and developed from kidney tissue of a
normal African green monkey, Cercopithecus aethiops, by Drs. Y. Yasumura
and Y. Kawakita at Chiba University. At that time, we were working at
LTV and were stationed at Middle America Research Unit (MARU) Balboa,
Panama Canal Zone. Much of the emphasis of our work was on arboviruses and
other related tropical zoonotic viruses. Of primary interest was Machupo
virus, the causative agent of Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. This virus had
been isolated at MARU a year earlier and we sought a cell line suitable
for quantitive viral assays and neutralization tests. Drs. Wiebenga and
Simizu reported successful production of virus plaques with Machupo and
several other zoonotic viruses in Vero.
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