Journeys of the Phage: Ruderal Science and Bacteriophage Chronicles from Twentieth Century Soviet and Post-Soviet Georgia

• In Event: Circulation of Medical Knowledge in Imperial Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet History

Abstract

Drawing on Cold War archives, oral histories, and ethnographic materials collected at the Eliava Institute for Bacteriophages, Microbiology, and Virology in Tbilisi, this presentation excavates the century long quest for bacteriophage therapy, tracing its fortunes in the pre-Soviet Georgian republic, under Stalin’s rule, through the pioneering efforts of the biologists Giorgi Eliava and the visiting discoverer of bacteriophages, Felix d’Hérelle (both of whom aligned at the scientific clearinghouse of the Pasteur Institute in Paris), and ending with discussion of the institute in the wake of the fall of the USSR, exploring ethnographically the efforts to preserve a novel technique of infection control under tumultuous post- Soviet conditions of war and destitution in the new republic of Georgia. Whilst it received extensive patronage under Stalin, bacteriophage therapy failed to compete for dominance against Western antibiotics in the 20th century, yet is being resurrected today as a form of “ruderal science”—a technique of the life-sciences ascendant amidst conditions of ruination—just as Eliava’s scientists recover from the historical devastations of the Soviet Union’s collapse to broadcast the Institute as a space of technoscientific salvation in emergent post-antibiotic worlds.

Author

• Rijul Kochhar, Harvard U