‘The Good Virus’ Review: An Unlikely Healer

In 2015, Tom Patterson, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Diego, fell ill while on holiday, soon after crawling through a tiny tomb in Egypt’s Red Pyramid. His condition deteriorated quickly, and he was transferred first to an intensive care unit in Frankfurt, Germany, and then to his home hospital in La Jolla, Calif. The underlying cause of his condition: infection with Acinetobacter baumannii—“the worst bacteria on the planet,” according to his doctors. Worse still, the strain was resistant to antibiotics. Mr. Patterson’s wife, an accomplished global-health epidemiologist, frantically searched the world for anything that might help. The treatment she landed on was “bacteriophage”—viruses that attack bacteria. The therapy, amazingly, worked. Mr. Patterson returned from the brink of death and eventually made a full recovery.

In the wake of the Covid pandemic, the idea of a virus being beneficial may seem strange, even implausible. But science journalist Tom Ireland is admirably determined to show us just how potent this disease-fighting approach can be and to persuade us of its importance. As engaging as it is expansive, “The Good Virus” describes the distinctive biology and murky history of bacteriophage (generally shortened to “phage”), a form of life that is remarkably abundant yet obscure enough to have been termed the “dark matter of biology.”

Phage viruses are everywhere, from frigid mountain elevations and seawater to plant leaves and, not least, the human body. The body’s 30 trillion cells are outnumbered by nearly 40 trillion colonizing bacteria and 10 times as many phage, predominantly in our guts. It is estimated that trillions of types of phage—most yet undiscovered—exist in the world, representing the “greatest source of genetic diversity on the planet,” Mr. Ireland writes.

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