🔬 Phage Takes

Bacteriophage Ecology Group News, or BEG News, was published mostly quarterly as an online newsletter for a total of 26 issues, starting July 1, 1999 and continuing through December 31, 2007. As follows is a reprint of an article from the newsletter, authored by Hans-Wolfgang Ackermann. Also included in issues were lists of new members to the Bacteriophage Ecology Group, an introduction to new website features, a list of upcoming meetings, phage images found on the web (remember, this was 1999, so effectively pre-Google), etc., but most of all, a listing of new phage ecology-related publications. The newsletter was modelled after T4 News, which was a printed newsletter distributed earlier in the 1990s. The newsletter's successors are the ongoing Phage.org website, phage-therapy.org, and the Bacteriophage Ecology Group Facebook page.

Hansjürgen Raettig, MD, was born in Stralsund, Germany. He studied medicine and obtained his medical degree in 1939. His doctoral thesis was on the influence of season and climate on pulmonary embolies. His early career can be summarized as follows. He was inducted into the army in 1939, worked during the war in a military hospital in France and in the Hygiene Institute in Greifswald, was a member of the Public Health Institute of the same city from 1946 to 1948, and was recruited in 1948 by the Robert-Koch-Institute in Berlin. The institute was then in dire straits, lacking basic furnitures and facilities, yet charged with heavy public health responsibilities. In 1952 Dr. Raettig became the equivalent of an assistant professor at the Free University of Berlin. He became a full professor in 1961 and then became acting director of the Robert-Koch-Institute, holding that position from July 10 of that year until March 7, 1976 and retiring from the institute October 10, 1976.

Dr. Raettig published more than 200 papers or books. Most were on vaccination, namely against typhoid fever, shigellosis, poliomyelitis, and cholera. He was also very concerned with epidemiology, public health, and seriological diagnosis of infectious diseases. In the early fifties, he became interested in bacteriophages, mainly in intestinal phages and their variability. This led to experimentation with phage media and inactivation experiments and culminated in a two-volume book entitled "Bakteriophagie", a literature documentation aimed at covering the whole vast phage literature and classifying it by using a large number of key-words. Two volumes covered the literature from 1915 to 1956 and from 1956 to 1965, respectively. The first volume was in German only and the second one was in English and German [Raettig, H., 1958, Bakteriophagie, 1917 bis 1956; Zugleich en Vorschlag zur Dokumentation Wissenschaftlicher Literatur & 1967, Bakteriophagie 1957-1965 (Bacteriophagy 1957-1965), both G. Fischer, Stuttgart]. The two volumes covered a total of 11,405 references.

Dr. Raettig was also interested in electron microscopy and offered a course on this subject which I had the good fortune to attend in 1958 or 1959. I remember him as a friendly and engaging teacher who took great pride to show how he had assembled and categorized the vast phage literature using perforated cards. The book "Bakteriophagie" is now a bibliophile rarity, much sought after by phage workers and extremely useful for its near complete coverage of the early literature on this subject. To my knowledge, nobody in the field of biology has ever assembled a similarly vast and structured documentation. It is certainly Dr. Raettig's most enduring legacy.

Hans-Wolfgang Ackermann
Félix d'Hérelle Reference Center for Bacterial Viruses
Department of Medical Biology
Faculty of Medicine
Laval University