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 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.)

An enthusiastic account of organisms that silently rule the Earth. Viruses are "smaller than the wavelength of light," and they replicate by invading a cell, multiplying, and then leaving, often killing the cell. A minuscule fraction cause human disease--polio, measles, flu, Covid-19, some cancers--but most are benign and often an essential part of life. Human viruses receive plenty of attention, but science journalist Ireland hits pay dirt by focusing on those that attack bacteria. Called bacteriophages or "phages," they often attack deadly human infections. In 1917, scientists discovered that certain liquids, filtered to remove bacteria, destroyed bacterial cultures. They theorized that the fluid contained viruses that were "too small to see with a light microscope." Researchers took up the idea of using these liquids to treat human infections. "For a few decades in the early twentieth century," writes the author, "the world went mad for phages, and phage therapy was everywhere." But phages are tricky. Some are weakly infectious; others are "hyper-specific, targeting only particular strains." At the time, technology was primitive, and governments were lax about preclinical testing. By the 1930s, antibiotics appeared, miraculous drugs that made infections vanish. Sadly, by the 1990s, their vast overuse in medicine and agriculture was producing a deadly epidemic of increasingly resistant and even entirely impervious bacteria. Inevitably, this revived interest in phages. Both optimistic and realistic, Ireland writes that designing a phage for a specific bacterial strain is more complex than developing an antibiotic, and clinical trials have proven frustrating and expensive. He describes dramatic cures but no breakthroughs so far. At the halfway point of the book, the author rewinds the clock to the 1930s, describing genetic and DNA--related phage research that has led to numerous Nobel Prizes and an ongoing scientific revolution that has extended from the discovery of the double helix to genetic engineering, cloning, and insights into the nature of life itself. A capably guided tour of a scientific wave of the future. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.