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Science Couple Phages Out Superbug

Medical researcher Steffanie Strathdee needed to save the life of her husband, researcher Tom Patterson, when he contracted one of the world's worst infections. She turned to phage therapy: using a virus to kill the bacteria.

Credit:

Steve Mirsky

Uncertain

Welcome to Scientific American’s Science Talk, posted on March 13, 2019. I’m Steve Mirsky. On this episode:

CLIP

That’s Steffanie Strathdee. She’s an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine working on HIV and other STD prevention. And the Tom she’s referring to is her husband Tom Patterson, himself a U.C. San Diego researcher who’s worked on behavioral interventions to prevent HIV transmission.


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But the story they’re going to tell in this episode is about how Tom got one of the world’s worst infections and how Steffanie led an effort to save his life with an unconventional therapy—which they hope to make conventional. They have a new book out, The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug. We spoke at their publisher’s office, Hachette Books, in Manhattan.

STRATHDEE AND PATTERSON SEGMENT

That’s it for this episode. Get your science news at our Web site, www.scientificamerican.com, where you can listen to the recent 60-Second Science podcast by Chris Intagliata about how if you break up an Earth-bound asteroid, like in the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact and so on, gravity might pull the pieces back together again and it’ll still be hurtling toward our planet—and now you’ve made it mad.

And follow us on Twitter, where you’ll get a tweet whenever a new item hits the Web site. Our Twitter name is @sciam. For Scientific American’s Science Talk, I’m Steve Mirsky. Thanks for clicking on us.

Science Couple Phages Out Superbug