Phage
Digital
23/05/2007
Phage
The results of a little spare time playing around with shaders in Cinema 4D.
Since Biblical times, there have been documented reports of river water having the ability to cure infectious diseases e.g. leprosy. In 1896, Ernest Hanbury Hankin reported that something in the waters of the Ganges and Jumna rivers in India had marked antibacterial action against cholera and could pass through a very fine porcelain filter. In 1915, British bacteriologist Frederick Twort, superintendent of the Brown Institution of London, discovered a small agent that infects and kills bacteria. He considered the agent either 1) a stage in the life cycle of the bacteria, 2) an enzyme produced by the bacteria itself or 3) a virus that grows on and destroys the bacteria. Twort's work was interrupted by the onset of World War I and shortage of funding. Independently, French-Canadian microbiologist Félix d'Hérelle, working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, announced on September 3, 1917 that he discovered "an invisible, antagonistic microbe of the dysentery bacillus". For d’Herelle, there was no question as to the nature of his discovery: "In a flash I had understood: what caused my clear spots was in fact an invisible microbe... a virus parasitic on bacteria." D'Herelle called the virus bacteriophage or bacteria-eater (from the Greek phago meaning to eat). He also recorded a dramatic account of a man suffering from dysentery that the bacteriophages restored to good health. In 1926 in the Pulitzer-prize winning novel Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis fictionalised the application of bacteriophages as a therapeutic agent. Also in the 1920s the Eliava Institute was opened in Tbilisi, Georgia to research develop this new science, and put it into practice. In 2006 the UK Ministry of Defence took responsibility for a G8-funded Global Partnership Priority Eliava Project as a retrospective study to explore the potential of bacteriophages for future stakeholders in the 21st century.
Credits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage