How genetically engineered viruses — and a rotten eggplant — prolonged a teenager’s life
In 2010, an undergraduate in Durban, South Africa, found herself scraping muck from the underside of a partially decomposed eggplant. It was, in a sense, homework. She was taking a University of KwaZulu-Natal course on viruses that attack bacteria, and a semi-rotten vegetable seemed like a good place to find them. The “enriched soil sample,” she wrote, was dark and moist, wriggling with worms and other spineless lovers of decay.
The sludge proved lively on a microscopic level, too, and the student had soon picked out exactly what she was looking for: a never-before-described bacteriophage virus that kills certain mycobacteria. She named it Muddy and got on with her life, earning more degrees, landing a job at a communications agency. Muddy, meanwhile, landed in a lab freezer in Pittsburgh — one frost-filigreed tube among thousands.
But then, on Wednesday, pulled Muddy and two other viruses out of their frozen obscurity. These bacteriophages, the authors reported, beat back an antibiotic-resistant infection festering inside a 15-year-old in London. The patient wasn’t completely cured, but after more than six months of injections and topical treatments, she’d gone from bed-bound
