Bacteriophage tales

A correspondent has asked me about the origins of a legend which has become known as 'The phage in the letter'. Common to all variants of this story is the following: one scientist, called X, sends a request to another, Z, for a particular bacteriophage strain which Z has discovered. Z replies saying he is not sending it out. X thereupon plates out the letter and retrieves the phage from it. Some versions include a third scientist, Y, to whom the outraged X takes the letter; it is Y who advises X on how to recover the bacteriophage. Now Z, in this story, is Norton Zinder, who discovered an RNA phage, f2, in the sewers of New York and who did not send out the phage to the large number of scientists who requested it. He also found a single-stranded DNA filamentous phage, f1, in the same sewage. Both f1 and f2 would only grow on bacteria with a sex factor. It has been suggested that I was either X or Y in the legend; that is, I either plated out the letter myself or got somebody else to do it. In fact, this is an invented story and, with one exception to be recounted later, I do not know that it has ever been attempted. I can now disclose the origins of this legend, which has a rather complicated prehistory. Readers of this column may have noticed that my generation spent a lot of time devising ingenious solutions to various problems which could have been handled more promptly and more simply. Among these was the perennial problem of what to do with the person who first sends you a request for ten phage strains, which you send by return, and then immediately asks for another fifty cultures, whereupon you begin to regret that you had answered so promptly. It never occurred to us that we could simply refuse at this point with the cry, 'Enough is enough'. No, the response had to be complicated and mysterious. The bane of every bacteriophage worker's life in those days was bacteriophage T1. This phage resists drying and once it gets into a laboratory it is almost impossible to eliminate. Raging epidemic infections of bacteriophage T1 have been known to wipe out a laboratory in a matter of hours. George Streisinger and I invented the idea of a phage in a letter as …