The forgotten cure, written by Anna Kuchment, provided a detailed overview of the origin of phage therapy, developments, and future possibilities.

In chapter one,  one thing that was mentioned by the book was that the clearing effect of bacteriophage was actually observed by two scientists who weren’t in contact with, and one, Fredrick Twort went one with his research, classified the phenomenon as just a result of what the bacterium produced and was nothing of significance,  while the other, Felix d’Herelle, also observed the clearing, didn’t simply ascribed the phenomenon to just something the bacterium produced but later on remembered the findings several years later exterminating locust and inspecting the stools of soldiers infected with dysentery, which led him to the discovery of phage that cured dysentery and naming the type of organism “Bacteriophage”. It is truly intriguing when we look back in history and make comments about what certain historical figures should’ve done, such as some might argue that if Fredrick Twort went on and conjure up the concept of bacteriophages before d’Herelle he would’ve received credit for the discovery of phages, but to me that is exactly the point, sometimes making a major discovery is not because of one’s luck or intelligence but how careful they approach the problem and how much they respect the results. To be fair, d’Herelle indeed had impressive memories, but being observant must also played a significant role, the clearings couldn’t have only appeared in Twort’s and d’Herelle’s Petri dishes, but they were the ones who published some sort of recordings and only d’Herelle made a push, later on, to finally made the discovery of phages. And even though his self taught sciences led to his researched filled with lots of personal speculations and unproven assumptions, he had excellent instincts and great experimental techniques and for that d’Herelle had earned his respect today.

Chapter two talked about the remarkable partnership of two individuals, Felix d’Herelle and Georgi Eliava, the chapter depicted the culture of the science community through the encounters of the duo, factions of scientists with different beliefs arguing and presenting evidence to back up their theory and also counter-evidence to discredit their rivals, sometimes you can’t just do science experiments, rolling up your sleeves and defending what you believe in would also seem like an important and regular thing for scientists. While in the midst of trying to prove the phages are a viable and effective treatment against bacterial infections, Eliava battles with the changes around his home country, and ultimately he was set up and gave his life falling to the victim of the xenophobia and communism in pursuit of knowledge when he made enemies in the attempt to set up a research facility in the USSR. While the story was a tragic one and the field of science had lost one of its best, the tale showed that the war was the reason the bacteriophage was originally brought to d’Herelle’s attention and partially how he was motivated to study the organism in order to create a solution for the then-fatal bacterial diseases, it also became the reason why the USSR funded the research trying to liberate their own people from diseases, but ultimately the wars and conflicts around Europe led to our tragic end for Eliava. War seems to speed up science, however, usually at the cost of far more, and in the developments of phage therapy, the war both helped and hindered the progress of phage research, which will be elaborated more in chapter three.

Chapter three talked about the fade of phage therapy, with d’Herelle, the original founder reducing his defense on phage therapy and the poor quality of the phage therapy clinical treatments, more articles voicing against phage therapy were piling up, the invention of sulfa drugs along with the discovery of penicillin, but ultimately because of the general distrust of the potency of phage therapy. Some of the reasons phage therapy was doubted were that scientists couldn’t receive an experiment result that wasn’t affected by other factors, such as surgical interference, patient recovering from the disease without any treatment or maybe poor doctor’s reports, that last one, maybe was just the frustration of scientists trying to find someone to blame. Overall, due to the simple administration methods and the publicity gained by curing the president’s son sulfa drugs were considered as the new savior of mankind, especially when in a time that new effective treatment was needed since WWII was generating the need for emergency field treatments when injured, and sulfa drugs killed off bacteria like nothing they’ve ever seen before, it soon became the cure under the spotlight. Most labs studying phages were shut down during the war and the field mostly abandoned.

In chapter four, Physics crossed paths with biology, since the traditional observing method was no longer viable when the very things the scientists were trying to see are smaller than what the naked eye could capture, and in this chapter, bacteriophages were used to study genes. By the early 1950s, scientists knew phages had DNA stored in their heads, but they weren’t sure what were the genetic materials made up of, so with both of the candidates tagged with radioactive materials they found that DNA was indeed the genetic material for phages, furthermore they also found that the genetic material only entered the bacteria, and their findings paved the way for Watson and Crick’s breakthrough in the concept of DNA structure. However, with the study of human and animal cells becoming easier, lots of the researchers who used to study phages turned to other fields and phage biology died out again in the 1970s.