Preface
When I was seriously starting to structure
my teaching efforts in second- and third-year
virology at my university, I came across Alan
J. Cann’s first edition of Principles of Molecular
Virology from 1993—and was immediately a
fan because he organized things like I did.
That is, he described viruses and how
they work in a comparative way, from first
encountering a host cell, through replication
and expression, to exiting the cell.
Moreover, his book was affordable in my
developing country context, while many
were not; accordingly, I recommended it to
generations of virology students through the
changing incarnations of our teaching, while
I did not bother for other weightier offerings.
We had a number of dealings over the years,
formally with me writing a chapter on plant
virus culture for a book he edited, but mainly
via social media, where I adopted him as my
trailblazing guru. Although I believe that I
beat him on the World Wide Web (in 1994),
it was he who subsequently introduced me
to the concept of microbiology/virology
blogging via his sadly defunct Microbiology
Bytes (I do ViroBlogy on the WordPress
platform), later to Twitter (@edrybicki), and
also to news aggregators (Scoop.it Virology
News). I owe him a lot, therefore, over quite
a wide spectrum of social media reporting
of academic and virological activities, over
many years.
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I was almost overcome, then, when
Kattie Washington of Elsevier contacted
me out of the blue to ask me to revise
Principles of Molecular Virology for a sev-
enth edition, as Alan was stepping away
and had recommended that I take over.
This was especially timeous, as I was con-
sidering launching my own textbook—and
now I can instead set sail in an extremely
well-crafted boat with a highly experi-
enced crew! The unexpected advent of the
SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in 2020 unavoid-
ably delayed my finishing the book, but it
also allowed me to considerably expand
what had only been a notional chapter into
a full-fledged (Chapter 8)!
I am also grateful to my long-time friend
Russell Kightley, illustrator extraordinaire,
for both making his pictures available, and
enthusiastically altering them on demand.
Thanks, Russell!
I am sincerely grateful to Alan for sug-
gesting it, and the staff of Elsevier—in par-
ticular Kattie Washington, Sara Pianavilla,
and Sajana Devasi—for their adoption of
me as the revision author for the seventh
edition of Cann’s Principles of Molecular
Virology and their patience with me as a new
author.
Edward P. Rybicki
University of Cape Town, South Africa