 Some were only a little smaller than the smallest known bacteria, and the smaller viruses were of similar sizes to complex organic molecules.In 1935, Wendell Stanley examined the tobacco mosaic virus and found it was mostly made of protein.In 1939, Stanley and Max Lauffer (1914) separated the virus into protein and nucleic acid, which was shown by Stanley's postdoctoral fellow Hubert S. Loring to be specifically RNA.