1. Dysentery was a major problem among troops during World War I. This need opened up the avenue for d’Herelle to make the discovery that some people were being miraculously cured of dysentery. Relating to locusts, d’Herelle was originally studying bacteria that killed locusts when he discovered that  there were some parts of his plate that had died for no explainable reason. What we now know as plaques. d’Herelle found the same clear spots on his plates when he examined the stools of some sick soldiers. These findings led to money being put into research for this microbial antagonist to  bacteria, as  dysentery was wounding military forces so greatly. This in turn led to the discovery of bacteriophages.

2. Like every great scientist d’Herelle was driven by his curiosity and could not let a question go unanswered. However, more than that he was extremely dedicated and passionate to science and treated it as more than a job. For example, when he took up an unpaid position. He was not dissuaded from continuing forward despite so many people doubting him. Eliava was similar in a sense, but he was described as more laid back, but both men were extremely dedicated to their craft. Eliava ended  up being executed due to the Soviet Regime.

3. Phage therapy wasn’t very well understood, so under normal circumstances it would’ve been extremely hard to get government  funding for research into  phage therapy. However, war pushes governments to move forward with risky moves in the hopes of getting the technological edge over their opponents. Since many people were dying of diseases such as dysentery, it was very important for governments to find a way to fix this problem before the enemy. This led to phage therapy research getting funded despite being such a new concept. Also, had the push for finding a cure for dysentery not occurred d’Herelle may have never made the connection between the spots on his plate in the locust killing bacteria and the dysentery patients.

4. A big reason phage therapy didn’t take off is because antibiotics seemed to be a better solution at the time. They were quick and very successful in treating bacterial infections. They also weren’t specific to certain bacteria. This wasn’t the problem alone, however, as there was the issue with scientists not fully understanding phage therapy yet and success rates of trials for phage therapy being pretty bad. Together this led to phage therapy being completely overtaken in functionality by antibiotics.

5. They were extremely curious on how bacteriophages replicated, which is how they joined the Phage Group. They discovered that it was DNA that was the genetic material for phages rather than proteins. Furthermore, they also discovered the replication mechanism for bacteriophages. Eventually they moved on to studying the reproduction of higher order life forms, which caused phage research to die out.