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Early in the 20th century, scientists noticed that something in their labs was making bacteria disappear.
They call these bacteriophages, things that eat bacteria, and they turn out to be viruses with countless real or potential benefits for understanding our world and treating disease.
A century later, we know they're the most abundant life form on the planet.
And with further research, they could be an answer to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance.
With me to discuss bacteriophages, or phages for short, Martha Clokie, director for the Centre of Phage Research and professor of microbiology at the University of Leicester, James Ebden, professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Brighton, and Klaus Kirk Heller, historian and charge de research at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research's cermets trois unit in Paris.
Starting with you, Klaus, who first noticed this phenomenon, and what did they make of it?
Well, because phages are so ubiquitous in the environment, microbiologists probably always observed them as soon as they started culturing bacteria, a culture that suddenly disappears, bacteria that won't grow.
But it's in the 1890s, with the rise of pure culture techniques, that we start getting quite a few reports about bacteriologists noticing some kind of weird principle, some kind of lysing principle, where cultures get destroyed.
And one of the first reports that seemed to indicate the presence of phages come out of India in 1896 by bacteria called Ernest Hankin.
And he notices when researching the water of the Ganges river that cholera bacteria are being lysed and killed when exposed to this water, as opposed to after this water has been boiled or well water.
So what does lysid mean?
It means that the bacteriophage destroys the bacteria culture, it explodes the bacterium.
Now, during this time, Hankin and many others, they have no modern notion of what a virus is.
And many of the techniques used to study viruses are only just starting to emerge.
So it's 20 years later, during the first world war, that we start getting the first systematized research on these lytic bacteria destroying phenomena.