🔬 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. 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 2000, 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.

"The phage group wasn't much of a group. I mean, it was a group only in the sense that we all communicated with each other. And that the spirit was — open. This was copied straight from Copenhagen, and the circle around Bohr, so far as I was concerned. In fact, the first principle had to be openness. That you tell each other what you are doing and thinking. And that you don't care who has the priority."

— Max Delbrück, quoted on p. 42 of Horace Freeland Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press (1996)

"We are not primarily interested in the destruction of the bacteria, intent on applying what we find to the therapy of infectious diseases caused by bacteria. Nor are we interested, primarily, in devising means to frustrate the growth of the viruses, intent on applying such knowledge to the therapy of infectious diseases in plants, animals and men caused by viruses. Such motives, noble though they are, are ulterior to our cause."

— Max Delbrück, 1946, The Harvey Lectures, 41:161-187, p. 163.

"Today, a bacterial virus is a parasitic microbe in ecology, a bacterial organelle during its existence as prophage, a marker on the bacterial chromosome in breeding experiments with lysogenic bacteria, a subgamete for which names are lacking when it transmits lysogeny, a vector of unrelated bacterial organelles, including other prophages, in transduction experiments, and the inciter of an explosive disease of nucleic acid metabolism when it mimics T2. Bacteriophages are all these things, and probably more to be discovered. To ask which is the correct view is to ask what is the proper function of a window: to admit light, to let in air, to keep out wind, to exclude rain, to frame a pleasing landscape, or to pique the peeping Tom."

— Alfred Day Hershey, 1957, Bacteriophage T2: parasite or organelle?, The Harvey Lectures, Series LI, 1955-1956, Academic Press, pp. 229-239 (quote is on page 238).

"Our inability to find phenotypes for so many mutants (of the newly completed Caenorhabditis elegans sequence) only reflects our ignorance of life. The advocates of 'modern' molecular biology, many of whom are trained in the art of cloning genes, will need to go back to their friends and colleagues versed in physiology, neurobiology, ecology and population biology; these disciplines will be critical in teasing apart the function of all of those genes. 'Functional genomics' is synonymous with 'biology' — biology against rich tableaux of sequence information. Who does not remember the seminars in which the speaker professed an interest in some biological phenomenon, and then nose-dived into a 40-minute description of gene mapping, cloning and sequencing? With the completion of the genome projects, one senses that these days will soon be over: back to biology."

— Ronald H. A. Plasterk, 1999, Hershey heaven and Caenorhabditis elegans, Nature Genetics 21:63-64 (quote is the last paragraph of the article).