Antibiotics may be at the end of their useful life, so we may have to return to another promising super-cure from the days before penicillin — phage therapy, the use of bacteriophages, or bacteria-eating viruses, to target an infection:
Since ancient times, there have been documented reports of river waters having the ability to cure infectious diseases, such as leprosy. In 1896, Ernest Hanbury Hankin reported that something in the waters of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India had marked antibacterial action against cholera and could pass through a very fine porcelain filter.
In 1915, British bacteriologist Frederick Twort, superintendent of the Brown Institution of London, discovered a small agent that infected and killed bacteria. He believed that the agent must be one of the following:
- a stage in the life cycle of the bacteria;
- an enzyme produced by the bacteria themselves; or
- a virus that grew on and destroyed the bacteria.
Twort’s work was interrupted by the onset of World War I and a shortage of funding.
Independently, French-Canadian microbiologist Félix d’Hérelle, working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, announced on September 3, 1917, that he had discovered “an invisible, antagonistic microbe of the dysentery bacillus”.
For d’Hérelle, there was no question as to the nature of his discovery: “In a flash I had understood: what caused my clear spots was in fact an invisible microbe … a virus parasitic on bacteria.” D’Hérelle called the virus a bacteriophage or bacteria-eater (from the Greek phagein meaning to eat).
He also recorded a dramatic account of a man suffering from dysentery who was restored to good health by the bacteriophages.
In 1926 in the Pulitzer prize-winning novel Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis fictionalized the application of bacteriophages as a therapeutic agent.
Also in the 1920s, the Eliava Institute was opened in Tbilisi, Georgia, to research this new science and put it into practice.
So, while the West was getting great results from cheap and easy-to-administer antibiotics, the Soviets were experimenting with phage therapy — and claiming great success, which no one else had replicated.
(Hat tip to Joseph Fouché.)