12 ms·

I was laughed out of my uni's microbiology department for even mentioning this 15 years ago. While my feelings were somewhat hurt, it wound up working out great

I was laughed out of my uni's microbiology department for even mentioning this 15 years ago. While my feelings were somewhat hurt, it wound up working out great for me. That experience led me to neuroscience and a wonderful graduate program, but I couldn't help but chortle a little bit with satisfaction reading this this morning.

chews 7y ago
It's a shame that progressive thoughts get laughed at in the field of academia.
- yellow_lead 7y ago
  Not sure why you're getting down voted. I completely agree.
- wpasc 7y ago
  really don't understand your down votes. How many breakthroughs were treated with contempt and laughter when they were first presented. Relativity? Immunotherapy? many others I'm sure
  - refurb 7y ago
    And how many ideas are touted and never pan out? You can’t blame people for being skeptical. I agree that arguments should stay academic and not resort to ridicule.
    - nine_k 7y ago
      Skeptical and sober is fine. It's how science should work. Laughing and ridiculing is not. It's how groupthink reinforces itself.
      - aledalgrande 7y ago
        Yeah, isn't curiosity and discovery what science is all about?
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    And that was before peer review! Now it's much harder for disruptive ideas to make it past the "peer wall".
    - Fomite 7y ago
      Phage therapy was researched by Félix d'Hérelle, a french-canadian scientist who was awarded the Leeuwenhoek Medal. Eli Lilly and Company were working on commercializing it in the U.S. The problem was phage therapy couldn't stand up to a disruptive idea: the large scale production of penicillin in the mid-40's.
      - BurningFrog 7y ago
        Didn't know that. But I can see how it seemed that penicillin had solved that problem forever back then.
        Fomite 7y ago
        Indeed. While Flemming himself was concerned about resistance, penicillin is: 1) Much broader spectrum than phage preparations 2) Easier to manufacture in large quantities 3) Safer, because you don't need to filter the prep to remove endotoxins It's basically a silver bullet - if you don't look too far in the future. It was incredibly disruptive.
  - gitgreen 7y ago
    Because it was a pointless blanket statement? Anecdote - One classmate went on to study phage therapy in Europe, another went to work for Intralytix a phage therapy biotech in the US, both PhDs. They were not laughed at by their advisor or their contemporaries for their decisions.
    - rhombocombus 7y ago
      While true, phage therapy was dismissed as propagandized pseudoscience from the Soviet Union since they were the pioneers in the initial research (and the research did appear dodgy TBH). The landscape has changed, but really recently that was not the case and many microbiologists viewed anything phage related as utter nonsense. I am happy to see more research happening.
      - Fomite 7y ago
        Note that phage therapy was used and understood in the west well before the Soviet Union came into existence. It fell out of use because of the dangers from poorly purified phage preps, and because antibiotics showed up at about the same time those issues could have been fixed, and are a far more useful general purpose tool.
        chmod775 7y ago
        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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy Edit: Found something here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3442826/ 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 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.
  - ppseafield 7y ago
    In the 80s in order to prove that ulcers were caused by bacteria, a doctor infected himself with said ulcer-causing bacteria and treated himself with antibiotics. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank-infectious-broth-gave-himself-an-ulcer-and-solved-a-medical-mystery https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...
    - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
      In the 19th century, in order to prove that "dirtyness" causes cholera, a man named Pettenkofer drank a vial of clear water contaminated with cholera. Fortunately he attempted to control the experiment by neutralizing his stomach acids beforehand, which prevented the cholera from becoming pathogenic. The colony passed through his digestive tract without incident.
      - skyyler 7y ago
        He neutralised his stomach acids to keep the V. cholerae alive, actually. They didn't pass through him without incident, every account of this story I can find notes that he did get sick. The modern perspective of the story seems to be that he had an immunity from previously having dealt with cholera.
        jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
        The story I heard was that Cholera automatically stops reproducing if its population gets high enough, and that keeping the cholera alive prevented it from spreading.
- killface 7y ago
  they'd be surrounded by constant quackery otherwise. ideas are a dime a dozen. clinical test plans and execution are not.
- Fomite 7y ago
  One person's experience is not generalizable. 20 years ago, the potential for phage therapy was a suggested review paper for an upper level virology class I was taking.
coretx 7y ago
There is a guy on YT who created and used a crispered phage at some canadian hackerspace biolab. He is no longer lactose intolerant. He can laugh at academia & .gov institutions and their archaic rules and regulations. Coincidentally we see similar trends in neuroscience as individuals playing with things such as TMS/TCS etc. can't be held back by institutions such as the FDA & academia thus rush beyond them. TL;DR Be proud to be at the forefront - it's worth so much more than a dinosaur opinion.
- allovernow 7y ago
  Surely there must be some potential risk here, right?
  - thatcherc 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure this is the video that describes the whole process, in case you want to hear more about it. (Haven't watched it myself but it's been on my to-watch list for while) Comes from a YouTube channel called Though Emporium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY
    - newnewpdro 7y ago
      I fully expect a follow-up to that video where he's developing a therapy to treat his obesity after years of eating pizza and ice cream.
  - davidw 7y ago
    Brings to mind this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evx_Ps85yu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evx_Ps85yu8
- emilfihlman 7y ago
  Iirc the cure was temporary and he won't be doing it again, but yeah he proved it can work, and work easily.
- cwkoss 7y ago
bra4you 7y ago
They were idiots when they laughed. The Soviet Union was actually leading in this for a long time (Georgia).
m463 7y ago
I don't know why this stuff didn't go anywhere. I remember reading this article, from 2003: https://www.wired.com/2003/10/phages/ https://www.wired.com/2003/10/phages/
- Fomite 7y ago
  There are very real challenges to the mass application of phage therapy. I love it, have for several decades, and am especially excited about the potential based on some new findings for it to work in combination with antibiotics, but from a practical perspective, it's difficult.
evandijk70 7y ago
Opposite for me - We could pick a three month project in our undergraduate (about 11 years ago), and one of the listed projects aims was to manipulate yeast cells with phages. I did not even consider it at the time because it seemed so far fetched and strange, and the probability of success so small. Good to see something came out of that line of research. Great to see that useful results came

chews 7y ago

It's a shame that progressive thoughts get laughed at in the field of academia.

yellow_lead 7y ago
Not sure why you're getting down voted. I completely agree.
wpasc 7y ago
really don't understand your down votes. How many breakthroughs were treated with contempt and laughter when they were first presented. Relativity? Immunotherapy? many others I'm sure
- refurb 7y ago
  And how many ideas are touted and never pan out? You can’t blame people for being skeptical. I agree that arguments should stay academic and not resort to ridicule.
  - nine_k 7y ago
    Skeptical and sober is fine. It's how science should work. Laughing and ridiculing is not. It's how groupthink reinforces itself.
    - aledalgrande 7y ago
      Yeah, isn't curiosity and discovery what science is all about?
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  And that was before peer review! Now it's much harder for disruptive ideas to make it past the "peer wall".
  - Fomite 7y ago
    Phage therapy was researched by Félix d'Hérelle, a french-canadian scientist who was awarded the Leeuwenhoek Medal. Eli Lilly and Company were working on commercializing it in the U.S. The problem was phage therapy couldn't stand up to a disruptive idea: the large scale production of penicillin in the mid-40's.
    - BurningFrog 7y ago
      Didn't know that. But I can see how it seemed that penicillin had solved that problem forever back then.
      - Fomite 7y ago
        Indeed. While Flemming himself was concerned about resistance, penicillin is: 1) Much broader spectrum than phage preparations 2) Easier to manufacture in large quantities 3) Safer, because you don't need to filter the prep to remove endotoxins It's basically a silver bullet - if you don't look too far in the future. It was incredibly disruptive.
- gitgreen 7y ago
  Because it was a pointless blanket statement? Anecdote - One classmate went on to study phage therapy in Europe, another went to work for Intralytix a phage therapy biotech in the US, both PhDs. They were not laughed at by their advisor or their contemporaries for their decisions.
  - rhombocombus 7y ago
    While true, phage therapy was dismissed as propagandized pseudoscience from the Soviet Union since they were the pioneers in the initial research (and the research did appear dodgy TBH). The landscape has changed, but really recently that was not the case and many microbiologists viewed anything phage related as utter nonsense. I am happy to see more research happening.
    - Fomite 7y ago
      Note that phage therapy was used and understood in the west well before the Soviet Union came into existence. It fell out of use because of the dangers from poorly purified phage preps, and because antibiotics showed up at about the same time those issues could have been fixed, and are a far more useful general purpose tool.
      - chmod775 7y ago
        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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy Edit: Found something here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3442826/ 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 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.
- ppseafield 7y ago
  In the 80s in order to prove that ulcers were caused by bacteria, a doctor infected himself with said ulcer-causing bacteria and treated himself with antibiotics. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank-infectious-broth-gave-himself-an-ulcer-and-solved-a-medical-mystery https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...
  - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
    In the 19th century, in order to prove that "dirtyness" causes cholera, a man named Pettenkofer drank a vial of clear water contaminated with cholera. Fortunately he attempted to control the experiment by neutralizing his stomach acids beforehand, which prevented the cholera from becoming pathogenic. The colony passed through his digestive tract without incident.
    - skyyler 7y ago
      He neutralised his stomach acids to keep the V. cholerae alive, actually. They didn't pass through him without incident, every account of this story I can find notes that he did get sick. The modern perspective of the story seems to be that he had an immunity from previously having dealt with cholera.
      - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
        The story I heard was that Cholera automatically stops reproducing if its population gets high enough, and that keeping the cholera alive prevented it from spreading.
killface 7y ago
they'd be surrounded by constant quackery otherwise. ideas are a dime a dozen. clinical test plans and execution are not.
Fomite 7y ago
One person's experience is not generalizable. 20 years ago, the potential for phage therapy was a suggested review paper for an upper level virology class I was taking.

coretx 7y ago

There is a guy on YT who created and used a crispered phage at some canadian hackerspace biolab. He is no longer lactose intolerant. He can laugh at academia & .gov institutions and their archaic rules and regulations. Coincidentally we see similar trends in neuroscience as individuals playing with things such as TMS/TCS etc. can't be held back by institutions such as the FDA & academia thus rush beyond them. TL;DR Be proud to be at the forefront - it's worth so much more than a dinosaur opinion.

allovernow 7y ago
Surely there must be some potential risk here, right?
- thatcherc 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is the video that describes the whole process, in case you want to hear more about it. (Haven't watched it myself but it's been on my to-watch list for while) Comes from a YouTube channel called Though Emporium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    I fully expect a follow-up to that video where he's developing a therapy to treat his obesity after years of eating pizza and ice cream.
- davidw 7y ago
  Brings to mind this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evx_Ps85yu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evx_Ps85yu8
emilfihlman 7y ago
Iirc the cure was temporary and he won't be doing it again, but yeah he proved it can work, and work easily.
cwkoss 7y ago

bra4you 7y ago

They were idiots when they laughed. The Soviet Union was actually leading in this for a long time (Georgia).

m463 7y ago

I don't know why this stuff didn't go anywhere. I remember reading this article, from 2003: https://www.wired.com/2003/10/phages/ https://www.wired.com/2003/10/phages/

Fomite 7y ago
There are very real challenges to the mass application of phage therapy. I love it, have for several decades, and am especially excited about the potential based on some new findings for it to work in combination with antibiotics, but from a practical perspective, it's difficult.

evandijk70 7y ago

Opposite for me - We could pick a three month project in our undergraduate (about 11 years ago), and one of the listed projects aims was to manipulate yeast cells with phages. I did not even consider it at the time because it seemed so far fetched and strange, and the probability of success so small. Good to see something came out of that line of research. Great to see that useful results came