I. Introduction In his biography "Arrow in the Blue" the author Arthur Koestler suggests ironically that the fate of an individual may be predicted by examining the content of the newspapers at birth. Adenoviruses were discovered in 1953 (ROWE et al. , 1953; HILLEMAN and WERNER, 1954). At this time the Salk poliomyelitis vaccine was developed (SALK et al. , 1954) and in the same year the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA (WATSON and CRICK, 1953) and the plaque assay for one animal virus (DULBECCO and VOGT, 1953) was announced. Thus, this new group of viruses was born with great...