An engaging book about the viruses that prey on bacteria, packed with inspirational stories of eccentric scientists, medical miracles and interwoven with how science and history affect each other.

Most people have never heard of bacteriophages, which is rather surprising considering they are the most common and diverse entities on the planet. They can be found anywhere and everywhere that bacteria or archaea occur — soil, air, and water. For example, every teaspoon of seawater contains millions upon millions of different bacteriophages.

Our discovery of phages (as they’re often called) is relatively recent. At the end of the 1800s, scientists discovered that when they filtered liquids to remove all bacteria, these filtered liquids destroyed bacterial cultures. Why? What was the cause? The researchers proposed that the filtered fluid contained entities that were “too small to see with a light microscope.”

Forbes