1. The USSR had a state controlled system of health care. During the cold war, since a lot of money was going into the arms race, there wasn’t anymore ability for the government to supply antibiotics. Therefore, phage therapy became a more popular solution to the issue of bacterial infections. Also, antibiotics were mostly being shipped from the western market, so antibiotics were dissuaded against using propaganda.

2. Stalin was a big proponent of Lysenkoism, which stifled scientific research greatly for Hirszfield. Furthermore, due to the Jewish lineage of Hirszfield and his associates  and the persecution of Jews at the time in Poland the Hirszfield institute was severely stifled in their ability to release any of their research in comparison to the Eliava institute. However, after Stalin died, the Polish government supported the Hirszfield institute. The Eliava institute on the other hand received more support during the war in order to develop therapies for soldiers in war. Later when the Phage Therapy Center opened up they differed in their support as the PTC has access to the research funding pooling effort of the European Union. This contributes to a large portion of research funding of almost all labs in the EU.

3. Merril treated mice with different versions of Lambda phage: the parent strain, Argo1, and Argo2. After the phage had been in the blood stream for some time she took blood samples and isolated the phages from the samples. She grew and propagated the phages then repeated the process for a total of 8 times. The result was  phages that were able to be injected in mice and survive filtration and kill bacteria. They tested the effectiveness on rats infected with E. Coli and Argo1 and Argo2 resulted in a drastic reduction in symptoms.

4. I personally feel like the biggest limiting factor to phage therapy in western medicine is the immense R&D cost preventing initial profit to keep a start-up going. That’s why the current system in place for some of these companies looks extremely promising for getting to the point where we can start producing phage therapy. First R&D needs to go into a more readily understood product such as in the case of EBI production of certain peptides for therapeutic use. The sale of said product can then be used to fund the research into phage therapy. What needs to be researched in my opinion is efficient means of production for phage therapy, as the first issue for any and all new products is development cost. To encourage more research to go into more effective therapy, research into more effective production must occur.