It's wild that there is a completely alternate tech tree that just never found popularity in the west.
Having lost all that knowledge is really a pity, and it's quite fortunate that the Soviets then the Georgians kept it going.
On a side note, d'Hérelle was a fantastic adventurer and his life is fascinating (the French version of [1] has a nice summary), even moreso than Yersin's (the discoverer of the bacteria responsible for the Plague[2], and founder of the city of Đà Lạt[3] in Vietnam).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_d%27H%C3%A9relle
Did you mean Alexandre Yersin or was Félix d'Hérelle also in Việt Nam at the time?
France military deserter, he fled to Canada and founded an alcohol making business there, then in Mexico. Self taught biologist as a hobby (he dreamed of becoming the next Pasteur), he found a way to use a bacteria as a pest control against crickets before discovering the first known bactoriophage. He then developed a bacteriophage-based cure for dysentery, plague and cholera.
Yersin somehow looks here like taken straight from the streets of Brooklyn.
Imagine an alternative timeline where it was a discovered in a nation whose theology involved lot of plants and trees. Powering civilization itself based on solar energy would be a dream from the getgo, so you would have a lot of academic attention and research early on.
Really what kickstarted the whole thing was pumping water from mines which didn’t need anything close to 24/7 operation and could thus handle the expensive, heavy, and unreliable nature of early steam engines.
An electrical motor might have been a lot simpler.
Not necessarily. Academic research needs not be 'practical' or be ready for commercialization, much like research into fusion.
In the West, we simply used antibiotics which were good enough until a decade or two ago, so we didn't need to invest in phages.
I hope the massive advances of sequencing will reach the clinics soon, it should be possible to get the genome of the infectious bacteria/virus in a couple of hours with today's tech. You can even infer the antibiotic resistance from this info, so you'd know how to treat the infection in a very targeted fashion.
What are the obstacles to this? I have been seeing articles lately about sequencing your own DNA at home in a few hours for about a thousand bucks. I guess the medical grade equipment has to be a lot more robust, so a lot more expensive? (And there might be an insufficient supply of biology interns to operate the equipment.)
My boyfriend got a whole stock of different antibiotics for his acne (that isn't even that bad). Women mention an itch in their private parts to doctors and, you guessed it, immediately get prescribed, often random, antibiotics.
I had a (not yet, but moving towards "life threatening") abscess. In the phase where we were still seeing if it could heal out by draining without antibiotics, no culture was done. When it quickly got worse, I got prescribed a set of three distinct antibiotics at once. That lead to me developing persistent gram negative folliculitis on the beard that another doctor wanted to treat with Ciprofloxacin, which is known to cause permanent tendon, cartilage, eye damage or death in a significant amount of patients. At my urging I got prescribed a different one. Which didn't help. I got rid of my folliculitis myself with an extreme regime of topical salicylic acid, tee trea oil and BPO.
Doctors pretty much roll the dice on which antibiotics they prescribe.
Considering the negative effects of antibiotics (disregulating the gut microbiome which leads to all kinds of problems, and exerting evolutionary pressure in the direction of antibiotic resistance), isn't selectivity actually a huge plus?
This process of encouraging adaptation appears to greatly increase successful outcomes.
The emergence of phage-resistant pathogens should not be encouraged, as we have encouraged antibiotic resistance.
I think it's a change in mindset, as well as a change in procedure.
The viral phages used to target this group are used in tandem with appropriate antibiotics, and the phages are "trained" in several rounds to optimize effectiveness prior to application.
It would seem reasonable to begin general distribution of this treatment for ESKAPE, and begin preparing similar treatments for what we might guess are the next few dozen that will join this group.
Sad I know, but the whole drug industry is primarily based around making money first. Which however coldhearted that sounds, is how business works.
This is all something touched upon recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30007863
Whilst this has been known for a long time, its an area of concern.
[EDIT typo]
By and large, there isn't that much profit in antibiotics these days; almost everything used in significant quantities is well out of patent.
The profit incentives in health care are perverse and misaligned, and in many cases delaying healing is more profitable than healing. This is why we need more world-wide government funding of research in curing and preventing diseases.
If hypothetically a mixture of apple juice and turpentine were to cure COVID, we may never discover that, because 1) such a mixture would be extremely cheap and easy to make at home, and not really patentable, and therefore unprofitable, and 2) there may never be enough government medical research funding to discover it.