| Do you have some sources for this? Because the Wikipedia article on phage therapy appears to directly contradict you. Directly after the paragraph about its discovery by an Englishman and a Frenchman: > A Georgian, George Eliava, was making similar discoveries. He travelled to the Pasteur Institute in Paris where he met d'Hérelle, and in 1923 he founded the Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia, devoted to the development of phage therapy. Georgia was part of the USSR at the time. It appears to be the first reference to any actual therapy. In any case it's a pretty tight schedule from the discovery of bacterophages in 1915/1917 to the formation of the USSR in 1922. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy Edit: Found something here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3442826/ > From its first field trials as a prophylactic against avian typhosis (Salmonella gallinarum) in rural France in 1919 [...] I'm gonna file that under kinda, but not really. Something more in Félix d'Herelle's biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_d%27Herelle > The first patient was healed of dysentery using phage therapy in August 1919. Many more followed. At the time, none, not even d'Hérelle, knew exactly what a phage was. |
But you will find on that same Wikipedia page an entry for d'Herelle, and if you follow that...as you note yourself, you get an animal trial in 1919 as well as a human trial. D'Herelle then heads to Indochina to work on Cholera, and he's awarded an honorary doctorate two years after the USSR is founded - along with one of the field's most prestigious medals.
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Is that a tight timeline? Yes. But the idea that "The West" ignored phages because it was some sort of Soviet pseudoscience is contrary to the historical record.
The west abandoned phage therapy because unfiltered endotoxins made phage therapy dangerous, and until the modern era, antibiotics are pretty superior in nearly every respect.