the company that’s now known as L’Oreal. People used his phages to treat skin wounds and to cure
intestinal infections.
But by 1940, the phage craze had come to end. The idea of using live viruses as medicine had made
many doctors uneasy. When antibiotics were discovered in the 1930s, those doctors responded far
more enthusiastically, because antibiotics were not alive; they were just artificial chemicals and
proteins produced by fungi and bacteria. Antibiotics were also staggeringly effective, often clearing
infections in a few days. Pharmaceutical companies abandoned Herelle’s phages and began to churn
out antibiotics. With the success of antibiotics, investigating phage therapy seemed hardly worth the
effort.
Yet Herelle’s dream did not vanish entirely when he died in 1949. On a trip to the Soviet Union in
the 1920s, he had met scientists who wanted to set up an entire institute for research on phage therapy.
In 1923 he helped Soviet researchers establish the Eliava Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology,
and Virology in Tbilisi, which is now the capital of the Republic of Georgia. At its peak, the institute
employed 1,200 people to produce tons of phages a year. During World War II, the Soviet Union
shipped phage powders and pills to the front lines, where they were dispensed to infected soldiers.
In 1963, the Eliava Institute ran the largest trial ever conducted to see how well phages actually
worked in humans, enrolling 30,769 children in Tbilisi. Once a week, about half the children
swallowed a pill that contained phages against Shigella. The other half of the children got a pill made
of sugar. To minimize environmental influences as much as possible, the Eliava scientists gave the
phage pills only to children who lived on one side of each street, and the sugar pills to the children
who lived on the other side. The scientists followed the children for 109 days. Among the children
who took the sugar pill, 6.7 out of every 1,000 got dysentery. Among the children who took the phage
pill, that figure dropped to 1.8 per 1,000. In other words, taking phages caused a 3.8-fold decrease in
a child’s chance of getting sick.
Few people outside of Georgia heard about these striking results, thanks to the secrecy of the
Soviet government. Only after the Soviet Union fell in 1989 did news start to trickle out. The reports
have inspired a small but dedicated group of Western scientists to investigate phage therapy and to
challenge the long-entrenched reluctance in the West to use them.
These phage champions argue that we should not be worried about using live viruses as medical
treatments. After all, phages swarm inside many of the foods we eat, such as yogurt, pickles, and
salami. Our bodies are packed with phages too, which is not surprising when you consider that we
each carry about a hundred trillion bacteria—all promising hosts for various species of phages.
Every day, those phages kill vast numbers of bacteria inside our bodies without ever harming our
health.
Another concern that’s been raised about phages is that their attack is too narrowly focused. Each
species of phage can only attack one species of bacteria, while one antibiotic can kill off many
different species at once. But it’s clear now that phage therapy can treat a wide range of infections.
Doctors just have to combine many phage species into a single cocktail. Scientists at the Eliava
Institute have developed a dressing for wounds that is impregnated with half a dozen different phages,
capable of killing the six most common kinds of bacteria that infect skin wounds.