The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage

Tiny viruses that prey on bacteria could open a new front against infectious disease, according to this fascinating primer. Journalist Ireland’s debut recaps the discovery of bacteriophages—“viruses that infect and kill bacteria” but are “essentially harmless to humans”—and details efforts stretching back a century to put them to use against harmful pathogens. Injecting or brushing phages on wounds has shown efficacy in curing dysentery and antibiotic-resistant infections, but large-scale deployment has proven difficult because phages are finicky about which bacterial strains they’ll eat and bacteria sometimes develop resistance to phages during treatment. Politics also stymied the therapy’s development, according to Ireland, who suggests that English-language scientists viewed it skeptically because they disregarded promising findings published in French, Georgian, and Russian journals and because the treatment’s most prominent innovators hailed from the Soviet Union. Ireland keeps the science lucid and entertaining in a narrative that’s full of colorful characters—in 1919, French microbiologist Felix d’Hérelle checked the safety of his phage elixir by swigging some himself before dosing his patient—and vivid prose: “The [culture] plates, where there was once a dense, healthy lawn of Shigella bacteria, would resemble a microbial killing field, covered in holes where the tiny epidemics were spreading.” The result is a captivating portrait of an overlooked remedy. (Aug.)