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Adolf Eduard Mayer (1843 – 1942) was a German agricultural chemist and director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at Wageningen in the Netherlands. He was called in 1879 to study a peculiar disease of tobacco. He is credited as the first person to transmit tobacco mosaic virus by using the juice extracts from the diseased plant as the inoculum to infect other plants.

At the time viruses were undiscovered, and the disease was thought to be spread by very small bacteria or toxins, though later experiments by scientists such as Dmitry Ivanovsky, Beijerinck and Stanley showed this was not the case. Mayer published a paper in 1886 describing the disease and its symptoms in detail. He is considered one of the fathers of modern virology.

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