The Good Virus

Author: Tom Ireland

This book goes into the wonderful world of bacteriophages. Phages are little viruses that attack and destroy bacteria in the process of replicating themselves. In a world, where our antibiotics are soon going to be ineffective bacteriophages may turn out to be one of our most important life saving medicines.

It turns out that while people discovered the existence of phages more than a hundred years ago, this field has not got its due from the scientific and medical community. This book goes into the the history of the early Pioneers, who put phages on the map, and then the trio of scientists, Delbrook, Luria, and Hershey, who really did phenomenal work in this area. They essentially invented an entirely new field of biology that was heavily dependent on mathematics to tease out the workings of phages.

Note that they started out on this endeavor before the discovery of electron microscopes before Watson, and Crick had their famous double-helix DNA model. In fact, Delbrook was driven with a mission to uncover the secret of life and phages were just a side product in his view. Unfortunately before he was able to discover the genetic code, Watson who was a student of Luria actually discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and the rest is history. However, the work that this trio has done has gone off to inspire at least six Nobel prizes and help make many other breakthroughs in the life sciences . 

Here’s some very interesting observations from the book

• There are more phages in a typical liter of sea water then there are humans on the planet. And there are 10^21 litres of water on the planet.
• CRISPR —> Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Discovered by Mojica while studying viruses in the hypersaline waters off the coast of Alicante, Spain.  It turns out that many bacteria have this Cas-9  (CRISPR associated) protein that can hunt for phage DNA sequences that match and cut them in half.
• The yoghurt industry pioneered the discovery and study of phages and CRISPR as they were lookin to protect the integrity of the bacterial strains that were used in the yoghurt culture.
• There’s an open source phage library called the “[Citizen Phage Library](https://www.citizenphage.com/)” project. To become a Phage Hunter, all you need to do is use their sample kit to mail a sample of water from your environment. You register the location and photos through their web-site and they’ll process it to identify new phages
• The OG of Phages is a French-Canadian scientist named Felix d’Herelle and there is a startup in the Bay Area named Felix that is developing a Digital Phage Platform.