Health Beyond the Blog: Lina Zeldovich and “The Living Medicine”

Lina Zeldovich discusses the lifesaving potential of bacteriophages with Maryn McKenna

by Rama Esrawee

The twentieth century was fueled by competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, each racing to prove their strength to the world. We missed out on a powerful discovery the Soviets embraced: bacteriophages, nature’s cure for bacterial infections.

Lina Zeldovich explores that profound discovery, and the potential of bacteriophages for curing infectious diseases, in her new book, The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost — And Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail (St. Martin’s Press). In a November 13 interview with Maryn McKenna in the Health Storytelling
series, Zeldovich discussed what sparked her interest in the subject, the history behind bacteriophages, and how their discovery led to remarkable cures.

As she described, Zeldovich grew up in the Soviet Union during the 1980s, raised in a family of scientists with a passion for discovery and research. It wasn’t until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990, when she immigrated to New York, that she discovered bacteriophages were not widely used in the United States. This realization sparked her exploration into the history of this long-forgotten, life-saving cure that could conquer antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.

She wanted to experience the history and significance of bacteriophages firsthand, rather than relying solely on existing studies. Zeldovich traveled to eastern Europe to visit the researchc enters and archives where phage therapy had thrived during the Soviet Union. Notable microbiologists, Canadian Felix d’Herelle and Georgian George Eliava, stumbled upon bacteriophages in the 1910s while studying infections such as cholera. They separately observed that the pathogen would mysteriously disappear from their samples. D’Herelle coined this phenomenon as a “parasite of microbes”, but it wouldn’t be until he began collaborating with Eliava in the 1920s that he fully understood the potential impact of bacteriophages.

Bacteriophages were first used as treatment for children suffering from dysentery in Paris in 1919. Patients were cured within 24 hours of treatment, marking the realization that bacteriophages could be used as medicine. Afterward, bacteriophages were widely incorporated in medical practices in the Soviet Union and Georgia, particularly in the absence of antibiotics. Eastern Europe kept the use of bacteriophages alive even after Eliava’s arrest and murder in the Great Purge.

Ultimately, Zeldovich and The Living Medicine shows us how bacteriophages could be an overlooked solution to many serious infections, including the bubonic plague. We now face a new challenge due to the United States’ overuse of antibiotics: the rise of antibiotic resistance in bacterial infections. As such, bacteriophages could be a possible solution in curing the very diseases that doctors in the United States struggle to treat.

The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost?and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail is available on Amazon and on Brookline Booksmith.