The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage

How a mysterious, super-powerful—yet long-neglected—microbe rules our world and can rescue our health in the age of antibiotic resistance.

At every moment, within our bodies and all around us, trillions of microscopic combatants are waging a war that shapes our health and life on Earth. Countless times per second, viruses referred to as phages attack and destroy bacteria whilst leaving all other life forms, including us, unscathed. Vastly outnumbering the viruses that do us harm, phages power ecosystems, drive evolutionary innovation, and harbor a remarkable capacity to heal life-threatening infections when conventional antibiotics fail. Yet most of us have never heard of them, thinking of viruses only as enemies to be feared. The Good Virus prompts us to reconsider, and to discover, how these viruses could save countless lives if we will learn how to harness their peculiar abilities.

Taking us inside the ongoing quest to use phages’ powers for good, Tom Ireland introduces us to the brilliant, steadily eccentric, scientists who have fought to realize phages’ potential in the face of doubt and political intrigue. We meet the renegade French-Canadian scientist who discovered phages and pioneered their use as medicine over a century ago, leading them to be hailed as the world’s first genuine antibiotic years before penicillin. We learn why, in some pockets of the former Soviet Union, drinking a vial of phages remains as common as taking an over the counter drug. We follow the intrepid scientists and doctors now racing to make “phage therapy” work all over the world as the threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria grows ever more urgent—while other researchers uncover how phages bolster our everyday immunity, help generate the oxygen we breathe, and furnish the origins for breakthrough technologies like CRISPR.

Unveiling the hidden rulers of the microbial world and celebrating the surprising power of viruses to heal, not harm, The Good Virus without end changes how we see nature’s most maligned life forms.