Medicine: Germ of Germs

The Jumna River at Agra, India, abounds with cholera germs. Some three miles below Agra the river is almost clear of them.

Last week Professor Felix d’Herelle—scarcely a name to the public but at Yale a tallish, dark, impatient, much respected protobiologist—gave the New York Academy of Medicine his explanation of such phenomena. Completely invisible parasites which he calls bacteriophage (TIME, May 28, 1923; Aug. 30, 1926) infest the microscopically visible germs and in some unknown way kill them. The microbes seem to dissolve into clear liquid. They are dead, for their residue cannot cause disease. But the residue is a potent poison of germs.

There may be a single kind of bacteriophage which adapts itself to destroy specific germs. Or there may be a particular bacteriophage for each kind of germ. Professor d’Herelle has cured dysentery, he said last week, by feeding sufferers with bacteriophage derived from dysentery bacilli. Special bacteriophage has also been successful against Asiatic cholera, bubonic plague.*

Professor d’Herelle is sure his bacteriophage is alive. But not all bacteriologists agree, for some of its characteristics indicate that it is a mere chemical poison (a nonliving enzyme or a catalyst) produced by the germs themselves.†

*When Yale’s Sinclair Lewis was preparing to write Arrowsmith, novel of doctors and medical researchers (TIME, March 23, 1925), Dr. Paul de Kruif (Microbe Hunters, Hunger Fighters) traveled with him, gave him his scientific information. They decided to make bacteriophage Martin Arrowsmith’s research goal. A climax of the story comes when the phage is tried out against an epidemic of bubonic plague. But Yale’s Professor d’Herelle was not Arrowsmith’s prototype. Born in Montreal (1873), he studied and worked abroad, joined Yale in 1928, speaks with a decided French accent.

†Similar to, perhaps identical with, the d’Herelle Phenomenon is the Twort Phenomenon discovered by Frederick William Twort of Lon don. The Twort bacterial secretion kills staphylococci (pus germs).