Félix d'Hérelle facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Félix d'Hérelle
Born	25 April 1873 Montreal, Canada
Died	22 February 1949(1949-02-22) (aged 75) Paris, France
Nationality	French
Known for	Bacteriophages
Awards	Leeuwenhoek Medal (1925)
Scientific career
Fields	Microbiology

Félix d'Hérelle (born April 25, 1873 – died February 22, 1949) was a French scientist who studied tiny living things called microbes. He is famous for helping to discover bacteriophages. These are special viruses that can infect and kill bacteria. He also explored using these phages to treat infections, a method called phage therapy. D'Hérelle was also important for showing how microbiology could be used in practical ways.

The Life of Félix d'Hérelle

Early Adventures and Learning

Félix d'Hérelle's father died when Félix was only six years old. From ages 7 to 17, Félix went to school in Paris. When he was 16, he started traveling around western Europe by bike. After finishing school at 17, he explored South America. He continued his travels, even going to Turkey, where he met his wife, Marie Caire, at age 20.

At 24, d'Hérelle and his family moved to Canada. He set up a lab at home and taught himself microbiology by reading books and doing his own experiments. He got a job from the Canadian government to study how to make schnapps (an alcoholic drink) from maple syrup. He also worked as a medic for a geological trip, even though he didn't have a medical degree. During this time, he wrote his first science paper. In it, he suggested that carbon was a compound, not just a simple element.

Work in Guatemala and Mexico

With little money left, d'Hérelle took a job in Guatemala as a bacteriologist at a hospital. He helped fight serious diseases like malaria and yellow fever. He also studied a fungus that harmed coffee plants and found a way to treat it. As a side job, he was asked to figure out how to make whiskey from bananas. Even though life was tough and dangerous there, d'Hérelle enjoyed working on real-world problems.

In 1907, he moved to Mexico to continue his studies on fermentation. He and his family lived on a sisal farm. By 1909, he had successfully found a way to make sisal schnapps.

Returning to France

D'Hérelle went to Paris to oversee the building of machines for making sisal schnapps. In his free time, he worked for free at the Pasteur Institute, a famous science center. He turned down a job to run the new Mexican plant because he found it "too boring." Instead, he tried to stop a locust problem on the farm by using bacteria that made the locusts sick. This was a very new idea for controlling pests!

In 1911, d'Hérelle and his family moved back to Paris. He continued working at the Pasteur Institute. He became known in the science world when his successful work against the Mexican locust plague was published.

Experiments in Argentina

At the end of 1911, d'Hérelle traveled to Argentina to test his locust control method on a much larger scale. He fought Argentinian locust plagues in 1912 and 1913. Even though some people said his success was not always the same, he believed it worked very well. Other countries then invited him to show them his method.

Discovering Phages in France

During World War I, d'Hérelle and his helpers, including his wife and daughters, made over 12 million doses of medicine for soldiers. At that time, medical treatments were very basic. The average lifespan was only 45 years.

In 1915, a British scientist named Frederick Twort found something small that infected and killed bacteria, but he didn't study it further. Then, on September 3, 1917, d'Hérelle announced his own discovery of "an invisible microbe" that fought against bacteria causing dysentery.

Here's how d'Hérelle found these phages:

• He put bacteria into a liquid, which made the liquid cloudy.
• He added phages, which killed the bacteria and made new phages. The liquid then became clear.
• He filtered the liquid through a special filter. This filter held back bacteria, but the tiny phages could pass through.

In 1919, d'Hérelle found phages in chicken waste. He used them to successfully treat a chicken disease called typhus. After this, he felt ready to try them on humans. The first person was treated for dysentery using phage therapy in August 1919. Many more patients followed.

At first, no one, not even d'Hérelle, knew exactly what a phage was. D'Hérelle thought it was a living thing that reproduced by feeding on bacteria. Other scientists thought phages were just chemicals. Because of this uncertainty, and because d'Hérelle used phages on humans so quickly, his work was often criticized. It wasn't until 1939 that the first phage was seen under an electron microscope, showing its true nature.

In 1920, d'Hérelle traveled to Indochina to study cholera and the plague. When he returned, he found himself without a lab at the Pasteur Institute. Another scientist kindly let him use a small space. In 1921, he managed to publish a book about his work, called The Bacteriophage: Its Role in Immunity.

Over the next year, doctors and scientists in Europe became very interested in phage therapy. They successfully used it against many diseases. D'Hérelle suggested using "phage cocktails" (mixtures of different phages) because bacteria could become resistant to a single type of phage.

Phage therapy became very popular and offered great hope in medicine. In 1924, d'Hérelle received an honorary degree and the Leeuwenhoek Medal. This medal was very special to him because his hero, Louis Pasteur, had received the same one. The next year, he was nominated eight times for the Nobel prize, but he never won.

Work in Egypt and India

After a short time at a university in the Netherlands, d'Hérelle got a job in Alexandria, Egypt. His job was to help stop the plague and cholera from spreading to Europe, especially from groups of Muslim pilgrims returning from holy cities.

D'Hérelle then used phages he had collected from rats with the plague to treat human patients in India. He claimed it was a success. The British Empire started a big campaign against the plague based on his findings.

In 1926, the British government in India asked for anti-plague phages for tests. D'Hérelle went to Bombay at his own expense to help. He solved a problem with the growth medium for phages by using papaya juice.

Later, d'Hérelle returned to India to work on cholera. He worked with other scientists, including Igor Nicholas Asheshov from Russia. They did experiments in hospitals and in the field. D'Hérelle and his team added phages to wells near crowded pilgrim camps. The number of cholera cases in those camps dropped a lot. They also gave phages and instructions to village leaders. However, many leaders did not cooperate, and the experiment ended in 1937.

Challenges in the United States

The next year, d'Hérelle turned down a request to work in India because he was offered a professorship at Yale University in the United States. Meanwhile, drug companies in Europe and the US started making their own phage medicines. They often promised too much.

D'Hérelle helped start a French company to make phages, putting the money back into phage research. But all these companies had problems. The results from commercial phage medicines were not always good. This was probably because phages were not well understood yet, and they might have been damaged or too weak. Also, sometimes the wrong type of phage was used for an infection. Many studies on phages were not done very well either.

Because of these problems, many important scientists turned against d'Hérelle. It was also said that d'Hérelle had a bad temper, which might have made him enemies.

Time in the Soviet Union

Around 1934, d'Hérelle went to Tbilisi, Georgia. He was welcomed as a hero in the Soviet Union because he brought knowledge that could save people from diseases.

D'Hérelle might have accepted the invitation for two reasons. First, he was said to like communism. Second, he was happy to work with his friend, Professor George Eliava, who founded the Tbilisi Institute. Eliava had learned about phages from d'Hérelle in Paris.

D'Hérelle worked at the Tbilisi Institute for about a year. He even dedicated one of his books to Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union. He might have planned to live there permanently, as he started building a small house on the Institute grounds.

But things changed suddenly for d'Hérelle. Eliava had a problem with a powerful secret police chief. Eliava was arrested and executed. After this, d'Hérelle quickly left Tbilisi and never returned. His book was banned.

Final Years in France

Even with all the problems, phage therapy became very important, especially for the military during World War II. But d'Hérelle couldn't fully enjoy this. He was kept under house arrest by the German army in Vichy, France. He used this time to write a book and his memoirs, which were 800 pages long.

After D-Day, a new antibiotic drug called penicillin became widely known. It was more reliable and easier to use than phage therapy. So, penicillin quickly became the main treatment in Western countries, even though it had side effects and led to resistant bacteria. However, phage therapy continued to be used in the countries of the Soviet Union until it broke apart.

Félix d'Hérelle became sick with pancreatic cancer and died in Paris in 1949. He was buried in Saint-Mards-en-Othe, France.

In the 1960s, Félix d'Hérelle's name appeared on a list from the Nobel Foundation of scientists who deserved the Nobel Prize but didn't receive one. He was nominated ten times.

France has not completely forgotten Félix d'Hérelle. There is a street named after him in Paris.

His Legacy

D'Hérelle was known for his creative ways of solving important problems in microbiology. But he was also criticized for promoting himself too much and for his business practices. He was also known for making enemies among powerful older scientists.

D'Hérelle's most important legacy is how phages were used in the molecular biology revolution. Scientists like Max Delbrück used bacteriophages to make discoveries that led to the start of molecular biology. Much of the early work on how genes work was done using bacteriophages. For example, James D. Watson, who helped discover the structure of DNA, did his Ph.D. work on a bacteriophage project. You can find more details about how phages helped in big biological discoveries on the bacteriophage page.

D'Hérelle was one of the first scientists to use microbiology in practical ways. His idea that microbes are very important has proven true. Today, microbes are used more and more in areas like cleaning up pollution (bioremediation), making energy (microbial fuel cells), and even in medicine (gene therapy).

Namesakes

A group of bacteriophages called Herelleviridae was named in honor of Félix d'Hérelle.

Books by Félix d'Hérelle

• 1946. L’étude d’une maladie: Le Choléra. French. F. Rouge & Cie S. A., Lausanne.
• 1938. Le Phénomène de la Guérison dans les Maladies Infectieuses. Masson et cie, Paris.
  • Russian translation with G. Eliava. 1935. Bakteriofag i fenomen vyzdorovlenija Tiflis Gos. Univ. (Tbilisi National University, Tbilisi, Georgia).
• 1933. Le Bactériophage et ses Applications Thérapeutiques. Doin, Paris.
  • English translation. with G. H. Smith. 1930. The Bacteriophage and its Clinical Application. p. 165–243. Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, Springfield, Illinois.
• 1929. Études sur le Choléra. Impr. A. Serafini, Alexandrie.
  • English translation, with R. H. Malone, and M. N. Lahiri. 1930. Studies on Asiatic Cholera. Thacker, Spink & Co., Calcutta.
• 1926. Le Bactériophage et son Comportement. Masson et Cie, Paris.
  • English translation, with G. H. Smith. 1926. The Bacteriophage and Its Behavior. The Williams &Wilkins Co., Baltimore.
• with G. H. Smith. 1924. Immunity in Natural Infectious Disease. Williams & Wilkins Co., Baltimore.
• 1923. Les Défenses de l'Organisme. Flammarion, Paris.
• 1921. Le bactériophage: Son rôle dans l'immunité. Masson et cie, Paris. , Internet Archive
  • German translation, 1922. Der Bakteriophage und seine Bedeutung für die Immunität. F. Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig.
  • English translation, 1922 The Bacteriophage: Its Role in Immunity. Williams and Wilkins Co./Waverly Press, Baltimore.

See also

In Spanish: Félix d'Herelle para niños