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iGEM Project 2023 | Part 2
Every day, for millions of years, an eternal war has been going on, claiming billions of victims every hour. This crusade is fought, and often won, by the deadliest organisms known: the bacteriophages or phages, for short. Calm down, calm down, we have not yet said who the victims are, we humans are not, in fact, the victims of this massacre, and neither are other superior animals, but we must descend into the microscopic world to find the answer: bacteria.
Phages are viruses, organisms that are neither alive nor dead – the debate is still on, and we are not taking a position here – capable of infecting bacterial cells. They are present everywhere, in all the objects we pick up and on the surfaces we touch, it is estimated that 40% of the bacterial species in the oceans are killed by bacteriophages every day, and yet, every day our cells encounter a number difficult to imagine, but these ignore them as if nothing had happened.
The first testimony of the “bacteria eaters”, this is the Greek etymology of their name, dates back to 1917 when a microbiologist from the Pasteur institute in Paris, Felix d’Herelle, published an article in which he described the death of some bacteria caused by an invisible microorganism, precisely defined as a “bacteriophage”.
Immediately the idea that these microorganisms could be a powerful weapon against bacterial infections gained popularity and already in 1919 (literally, immediately) d’Herelle himself and several of his colleagues ingested a cocktail of phages – now this would never be possible – to test its safety in humans. Subsequently, a similar cocktail was administered to a 12-year-old boy suffering from severe dysentery – not even this could ever happen now – whose symptoms disappeared after a single administration, to then recover in a few days. But we will come back to this story later…