It’s Been Phages!

Episode 4 of our series, “The History of Phage Therapy” and the first instalment of a three parter on the colossal Twort-d’Herelle Controversy. This controversy was a big deal at the time, and it really shook the trajectory of phage therapy and was perhaps partly responsible for its downfall in the Western World. There were two big questions at the heart of this controversy: what were bacteriophag...

Who is Fredrick Twort? Well that was exactly the question on Felix d'Herelle's mind in 1921! After publishing his discovery of bacteriophage in 1917, d'Herelle was riding high for a few years until it was revealed that an English scientist - named Fredrick William Twort - had in fact discovered bacteriophage (or something similar) in 1915. In this episode we introduce Fredrick Twort an...

In 1915, as World War One raged, Felix d'Herelle was sent to investigate an awful outbreak of dysentery on the outskirts of Paris. From this, he would finally have his fateful encounter with bacteriophage. After publishing his paper "On an invisible microbe antagonistic toward dysenteric bacilli", d'Herelle's life and the entire course of history would be altered . However, this publication also s...

In today's episode we introduce the arguably most important figure in the history of phage therapy: Felix d'Herelle. Felix d'Herelle would go on to discover* bacteriophages in 1917 just as the Great War was beginning to wind down. In this episode we focus on introducing d'Herelle and his life leading up to this fateful discovery. As you will see, even outside of his discovery of ba...

The very first episode in a coming series on the history of phage therapy and research. To make sure all future listeners are on an equal footing, I thought it was a good idea to introduce the very basics of bacteriophage biology. Give this a listen not only for a quick biology crash course but for a fun bit of etymology and an extremely forced IKEA metaphor! Stay tuned for the future episodes in...