Ivanovsky was born in the village of Nizy,
Gdov Uyezd. He studied at the
University of Saint Petersburg under
Andrei Famintsyn in 1887, when he was sent to
Ukraine and
Bessarabia to investigate a tobacco disease causing great damage to plantations located there at the time. Three years later, he was assigned to look into a similar disease occurrence of tobacco plants, this time raging in the
Crimea region. He discovered that both incidents of disease were caused by an
extremely minuscule infectious agent, capable of permeating porcelain
Pasteur-Chamberland filters, something which bacteria could never do. He described his findings in an article (1892) and a dissertation (1902). Then he worked at the
Imperial University of Warsaw and at
Donskoy University in
Rostov on Don. In 1898, the Dutch microbiologist
Martinus Beijerinck independently replicated Ivanovsky's experiments and became convinced that the filtered solution contained a new form of infectious agent, which he named virus. Beijerinck subsequently acknowledged Ivanovsky's priority in the discovery of the filterable, submicroscopic entity. ==Notes==