The Forgotten Cure, by Anna Kuchment, offers us insight into phage biology and therapy well beyond the textbooks, as well as offering us the story behind scientific discoveries such as phage biology. After reading the first four chapters of the book, here are my thoughts about what I have discovered about the process of scientific discovery:
The father of bacteriophages, and a pioneer for one of the most incredible advances in modern science, was self taught. How incredible is that? There are so many things that culminated into the discovery of the world of microbes, and more specifically, phages. All building off the knowledge and discoveries made by those prior. D’Herelle, of course, discovered bacteriophages purely by chance while plating bacterial cultures during his work with sick locust. The war brought forth new evidence for the plaques D’Herelle discovered on his agar plates as patients recovering from dysentery yielding plaques in the bacterial colonies taken from their stools, as he tested the introduction of phages to bacterial solutions. Of course, a discovery wouldn’t be complete without opposition right? The concept of bacteriophages contradicted many long-held beliefs in the world of microbes, but that did not stop D’Herelle from holding strong to his beliefs. He was able to successfully treat diseases such as the bubonic plague, a disease that had troubled mankind since the dark ages by using phage therapy 15 years before the discovery of penicillin. Also, to me it is incredible how fast D’Herelle was able to achieve legitimate results by jumping straight to human trials as there were no regulatory agencies in his way. I know that those agencies are put in place to ensure proper ethical and legitimate research is being conducted, but in the case of phage therapy, nothing screams legitimate results like human phage treatment.
It surprised me just how much human conflict drives scientific discovery, especially in the case of phage therapy. In times of war, countries will put forth their efforts into the sciences, in the hopes that something will turn up that will give them the edge on their competitors. That was the case of the USSR in the early to mid 30s, following World War I and leading up to the front of World War II. I was completely unaware of the “war on disease” Stalin had called upon the USSR, establishing institutions dedicated to acquiring knowledge of bacteriophages.
The biggest thing that frustrated me regarding the story of phages was the overwhelming amount of ignorance that impeded the process of scientific discovery. Despite physician experimentation occurring in the 1930s in the United States, they were incapable of producing legitimate results simply due to their inability to perform consistent experiments. In addition to this, many held fast to their beliefs that there existed no organism smaller than a bacterium, and those who held the correct viewpoint on phages were in the overwhelmingly small minority. Due to these failures in research, phage therapy results were few and underwhelming, leading bacteriophage results to be overshadowed by new drug advances in the form of sulfa pills and of course, penicillin. These two untimely discoveries helped solidify phage therapy’s fate in the early 1940s, as the people in the scientific community simply lost interest and moved on to the next thing that caught their eye. Despite experimentation continuing with scientist like Delbruck and Luria discovering that DNA was the genetic material and not protein through the use of bacteriophages, not much was done in terms of their use in medicine. Technology did not help push phage researcg forward as it allowed humans to work with larger animal cells, completely leaving bacteriophages behind in the 70s. If only American medicine had continued to keep phage therapy in their sights instead of sweeping it aside, the possible discoveries we could have made by now in 2019 after almost 80 years of research would be incredible.
In conclusion, the road to scientific discoveries is a long one, and this holds true in the case of phages. Initially deemed as agents of “immunity”, bacteriophages seemed to offer humanity the cure to bacterial infection, only to be forgotten after new discoveries pushed it away. Now, over 100 years after their initial discovery by D’Herelle, they have made their way back under the sights of scientists’ microscopes as they once again offer us a solution to the issue of super-bacterial infections, beginning the road to scientific discoveries for phages once again.
