Dark Matter by Dr James Kinross

Author:Dr James Kinross [Kinross, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241543993
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2023-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

Biopolitics shape the microbiome

By 1933 the French-Canadian self-taught microbiology maverick Félix d’Hérelle had founded the Laboratoire du bactériophage for the development and production of phage therapy. His work had originally been funded by the British-Indian government, which had in 1927 opened the ‘Bacteriophage Inquiry’ to evaluate phage properties in the treatment and prophylaxis of cholera and plague, with amazingly successful results.5 Giorgi Eliava, a Georgian physician and bacteriologist who had worked with d’Hérelle during an extended visit to the Pasteur Institute in 1918, became another key proponent of bacteriophage research. Eliava and the left-leaning d’Hérelle became firm friends, and in 1923 Eliava founded a bacteriological research centre in Tbilisi with the blessing of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who funded much of this work. In 1933, d’Hérelle left Yale University to join his protégé, and between 1934 and 1936 he established two more phage production laboratories in Kiev and Kharkov, by government invitation. D’Hérelle stayed in Russia until 1937, when Eliava and his wife were arrested for the crime of being intellectuals. It is thought his actual crime was to fall in love with the same woman as Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the secret police to Joseph Stalin. Whatever the reason, Beria deemed it serious enough to have both Eliava and his wife executed. Despite Eliava’s death, the institute continued its pioneering work, and in the 1940s it developed phage against anaerobic infections such as gangrene. The Red Army physicians used phage therapy during the war in Finland, and it is alleged that German troops expressly occupied Georgia in the Soviet Union to seize the phage produced at one of d’Hérelle’s scientific centres.

Meanwhile the Americans were not exactly twiddling their thumbs on phage. The famous ‘phage group’, an informal network of scientists begun in 1940, was founded by the physicist Max Delbrück and also made major insights into this area of biology. Jim Watson, who went on to discover the double-helix structure of DNA, performed his PhD under Delbrück’s supervision and demonstrated that phage can participate in genetic recombination. However, the Allied health strategy during the Second World War was firmly based on antibiotic therapy.

The Russian military’s love of phage did not slow after the Soviet Union broke up. In the 1990s, Georgian soldiers fighting in the breakaway Abkhazia region carried spray cans filled with phage against five bacteria: Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Streptococcus pyogenes and Proteus vulgaris, and phage continue to be widely available in many Russian cities, where they can be bought in a pharmacy without prescription. Phage therapy and prophylactic measures became ideological symbols of divisions and disagreements between Western and Eastern countries. In the West, antibiotics would become the weapon of choice – and their misuse would have serious implications for human ecology.

At the end of the Second World War the need for effective antibiotic therapy continued and became a source of continued tension between East and West. Penicillin was of such immense importance that it was used as an espionage tool at the start of the Cold War.

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