We worked with the Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society (the civilian branch of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) to compile an international review of the microbiology, including virology, of drinking water in industrialized nations (Cliver and Newman 1984) . The article, written by 50 scientists in 11 countries, was eventually published as a special edition of a journal (Cliver and Newman 1987) . Biodegradation Early on, I had the idea that, since viruses are not known to autolyze when they lose infectivity, they may be subject to enzymatic or biological degradation in the environment or else they would accumulate at high levels over millennia. Accumulation of vast numbers of viruses in marine water has been reported (Chen et al. 2001 ), but these are not necessarily agents of human infection, nor are they necessarily infectious as detected. We were able to show that some proteases and some microbes would attack enteroviruses (Cliver and Herrmann 1972) ; CA9 was especially susceptible to enzyme attack (Herrmann and Cliver 1973a) . By differential radionuclide labeling, we demonstrated that CA9 and PO1 in lake water were inactivated by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which selectively used their coat protein, but not the RNA, as substrate (Herrmann et al. 1974) .