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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75.1 (2001) 159-161



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Book Reviews

Félix d'Hérelle and the Origins of Molecular Biology


William C. Summers. Félix d'Hérelle and the Origins of Molecular Biology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. xii + 230 pp. Ill. $30.00.

With antibiotics fecklessly giving in to old and new microbes, interest again has arisen in the possibility of using bacteriophages as a "natural" remedy and preventive for certain infectious diseases. The idea of using these antibacterial viruses therapeutically goes back to the French-Canadian microbiologist Félix d'Hérelle (1873-1949), codiscoverer of the bacteriophage phenomenon and zealous advocate of its curative potential. The use of bacteriophage to combat epidemics formed a central plot element in Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith. Intrigued to discover that the bacteriophage motif in Lewis's novel rested on fact, this reviewer when a medical student obtained permission to write his second-year [End Page 159] term paper in microbiology at Temple University School of Medicine on d'Hérelle, phage, and the controversies over bacteriophage as therapy. My mentor in both medicine and history, Fred Rogers, arranged for publication of that sophomoric effort. It is a pleasure thirty years later to encounter the volume that does the job--and more--properly (and, of course, there has appeared much worthy historical scholarship on d'Hérelle and bacteriophage in the intervening years).

D'Hérelle's was a life worth telling: he was a largely self-taught scientist who achieved worldwide fame (though never the Nobel Prize he no doubt expected); a professed opponent of capitalism (he spent productive years in the Soviet Union) with a taste for expensive automobiles; and a theorist on the nature of life who sought prompt practical application of his discovery. Much in the manner of Pasteur, d'Hérelle before taking on problems of human disease carried out a variety of chemical and bacteriologic tasks, traveling widely to do so. In Guatemala, he accepted the charge of finding a way to ferment surplus bananas into whiskey; in Argentina, he studied epizootics of locusts. His interest in epizootics set the intellectual stage for both his major discovery and his way of understanding it and using it to formulate a new concept of disease and recovery.

The discovery was, of course, the bacteriolytic principle eventually known to be a virus, also observed and reported by the English scientist Frederick Twort in 1915, two years earlier than d'Hérelle's publication. D'Hérelle, however, never acknowledged that Twort had hit upon the same phenomenon, and he dueled for years with adversaries (though not Twort himself) who did not wish to see him win priority. More important, d'Hérelle expended much time, energy, and inventive experimental work to advance his belief that the lytic action represented a living microbe, rather than, as Jules Bordet insisted, some sort of enzymatic process. William Summers effectively re-creates a period in an emerging science when competing ideas boiled, and so did passions among some of their laboratory exponents. While priority disputes and other forms of discord are hardly unknown within scientific communities today, d'Hérelle leads us back to times when the exaggerated concern for honor, masculinity, and ambition seemed more eruptive and potentially disruptive among researchers--when a prominent scientist might actually have archenemies, wage epistolary warfare in the columns of journals, or challenge an opponent to a duel of experiments (with seconds).

D'Hérelle was a particularly grandiose and difficult individual. His ideas were not small ideas: he insisted that his discovery counted as a new form of life, and perhaps represented the earliest form of life. He believed not just that bacteriophage could be used to treat disease, but that the entire phenomenon of natural recovery from infectious diseases and the cessation of epidemics depended upon bacteriophage. Some of his later speculations, as reported by Summers, suggest that late in his life a sort of bacteriophagic mania had overcome d'H&eacute...

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