Historical review: viruses, crystals and geodesic domes.

In the mid 1950s, Francis Crick and James Watson attempted to explain the structure of spherical viruses. They hypothesized that spherical viruses consist of 60 identical equivalently situated subunits. Such an arrangement has icosahedral symmetry. Subsequent biophysical and electron micrographic data suggested that many viruses had >60 subunits. Drawing inspiration from architecture, Donald Caspar and Aaron Klug discovered a solution to the problem - they proposed that spherical viruses were structured like miniature geodesic domes.