Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/26/the-perfect-predator.html
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I wonder if they cause autism? /s
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I thought The Phage was bad?
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Biggest issue with phage therapy is the extreme specificity. With most antibiotics, if you know generally what you are dealing with, you can pick an antibiotic with a decent degree of certainty that it will work. Resistant superbugs are bringing that to an end. To make phages work, you need to know pretty specifically what you are fighting. Almost to the point of one bug, one drug. In the 1920s, which was pretty much the high water mark of phage research in the West, there were mixtures of different phages that sorta worked, but this was also before detailed knowledge of how they worked. Great potential, more complicated and does not obviate the resistance problem. Remember, these guys have been duking it out for literally billions of years, and evolution is a merciless mother.
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Also, being organisms that can evolve, there isn’t really a guarantee that phages against pathogenic strain X will really stay that way. Maybe they’ll mutate to infect beneficial strain Y instead.
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Exactly. This arms race way predates us, and will continue after us. Certainly trying to make use of it makes sense, but it’s a Red Queen situation, and they are both running really fast.
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I first learned about phages from Greg Bear’s 2002 sci-fi thriller Vitals.
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