Joe, if I had a lily that was the only one or two of its kind in the world that I couldn't part with, here's what I would do upon noticing a virus. First, if I noticed the virus before blooming, I would let it seed or cross it with a sister for seed and save all the pollen I could. Second, I would pull about a half dozen good scales and propagate quite a few more clones even though it's virtually guaranteed they also would be virused for more crossing and more seed and pollen during (n +2,3,4). Young clones, even though virused, are quite vigorous. Hopefully, the seed from these young virused clones would give me a nice tight group with little variation and I'd end up with a nice strain. That's half of the story. The other half has to do with tissue or micro culture. Even though reproduction by this method is vegetative, it's well established that virus free areas often exist in areas of new fast growth such as newly emerging leaves, buds, stems and new scales. And tissue culture is one way to resurrect a virus free duplicate from a virused one. Since I don't have an electron microscope, If I were to do it, I would have probably only a 50-75% success rate the first time through, but repeating the procedure a second time, the numbers jump to about 90% that are virus free. These numbers are from people I know who do this with virused lilies and other virused plants frequently for the challenge, without the aid of an electron microscope and I no longer have any doubt with what they do. I have everything I need for tissue culture here, myself as well. These are the procedures I would take because they are the ones I most familiar with and comfortable in doing.
As far as using the heat method goes, I'd be afraid I'd damage the bulb beyond recovery; the fear of the unknown as well, I guess. And since I'd have only one bulb to work with it would be a one shot deal--that's a pretty big gamble; all or nothin'. Why not just heat some scales? If I had a dozen virused bulbs to experiment with, it would try it just for knowledge gained, but not on a single bulb. I'd have to learn a whole lot more about it first, Joe.
