Bacteriophage (suggested by Betty)
voracious
crusader
you fight and conquer
single-purpose
life-restoring
healer
time capsule
forward-looking
past-remembering
semi-clone of the parent
what do you remember
recycler
of waste
the death-bringers we fear
you crave
and put to flight
and then
when the enemy is gone
so are you
I know a good bit about phage already, thanks to long association with the phage biology lab at The Evergreen State College (link to the biennial meeting in the bar at the top of the page). That said, there is always more to learn. For details today I looked up the Eliava Institute and discovered that this year marks the 120th birthday of the founder, George Eliava. What I find remarkable about Eliava is that he almost single-handedly bulldozed his way into history — he had an idea and didn’t give up, despite the odds. It’s a great lesson for the youth of today.
I also looked up a few of the news articles about Evergreen’s involvement in phage research. Here is one from a few years back that illustrates one application of phage therapy in the food stream. In general, bacteriophage are viruses that target specific bacteria, adapting along with them and using them as a food source. Bacteriophage are not known to start attacking cells other than their targets, and so have been used successfully for almost 100 years as medical treatment for specific bacterial infections such as those that cause gangrene.
The T-even phages are the ones I am most familiar with, specifically T-4. They look like a lunar landing capsule from the 1960s, a “head” that holds the DNA held on a stalk of sorts that ends in several long, spiderlike appendages which latch on to the bacterium. The legs slowly fold up, placing the stalk on the surface of the bacterium. Then the phage injects its DNA into the bacterium, uses the bacterial replication mechanism to reproduce. It’s a rather elegant way of fostering one’s offspring… And the whole process takes less than an hour.
I also found an article about a lovely woman whom I had the joy of meeting several times. Gisela Mosig, was a wonderfully warm, interesting person and it was a privilege to know her. This article goes into detail about her work, and has a long bibliography at the end if you are curious about some of the research in this field. I also recommend the paper on the T-4 genome which was co-authored by our friend Betty and lists several of her papers in the references. It has been amazing to watch the development of genomics and the progress made in this field over the last thirty or so years!