Life beyond eradication: veterinary viruses in basic science

To some, the focus of research in virology entails the search for solutions of practical problems. By definition then, attention is limited to those v iruses that cause disease or to exploitation of some aspect of virology to a practical end (e.g., antiviral drugs or vaccines). Once a disease is cure d, or the agent eradicated, it is time to move on to something else. To oth ers, virology offers the opportunity to study fundamental problems in biolo gy. Work on these problems may offer no obvious practical justification; it is an affliction of the terminally curious, perhaps with the outside hope that something "useful" will come of it. To do this so-called "basic scienc e", one must find the most tractable system to solve the problem, not the s ystem that has "relevance" to disease. I have found that veterinary viruses offer a variety of opportunities to study relevant problems at the fundame ntal level. To illustrate this point, I describe some recent experiments in my laboratory using pseudorabies virus (PRV), a swine herpesvirus.