ABSTRACT
RNA silencing has only emerged as a topic of general interest in the past ten years but, as a matter of fact, the first paper dealing with the effects of RNA silencing was published as long ago as 1928. In that research paper tobacco plants were described in which only the initially infected leaves were necrotic and diseased owing to infection with
Tobacco ring spot virus (TRSV; Wingard 1928)). The upper emerging leaves were asymptomatic and resistant to secondary infection, a phenomenon which was described as “recovery”. At the time this “recovery” was a mystery, since there was no obvious way to explain this phenomenon.
