A Forgotten Phage Thinker: Bacteriophage Research in USSR in 1930s and the Contribution by Professor M.I. Lurie

Despite the difficult and turbulent history of Russia and the USSR during the period from the 1917 revolution until the end of World War II, in 1945, research on bacteriophage therapy (PT) and basic bacteriophage biology developed in the country starting in the 1920s, concurrently with the development of this field in the West. While practical achievements in PT made in the USSR are quite well known to the scientific community, the efforts of Soviet scientists to discover the nature of phages and PT mechanisms in the 1930s have essentially fallen out of scholarly discourse. Here, I introduce a valuable source of historical information and a beautiful piece of early bacteriophage and PT conceptualization: the monograph by Prof. M.I. Lurie “Twort–d’Hérelle Phenomenon,” which appeared days before the beginning of the devastating Great Patriotic War (1941) and was totally obscured by the war events, escaping the attention of historians of science.