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