How the Navy brought a once-derided scientist out of retirement — and into the virus-selling business
FORT DETRICK, Md. — By the time word reached the U.S. Navy, the situation was dire. A man was dying. At most, he had a few weeks left. There was an experimental treatment that might help — and one of the biggest stashes in the country was kept here, behind the checkpoints of a military base, in a lab directed by Lt. Commander Theron Hamilton. The patient’s family desperately wanted a few vials, but the Navy had never tested the stuff on people. What if it caused more harm than good? Would the Navy be liable? But what was a little liability when weighed against a human life?
Just thinking about it made Hamilton’s adrenaline surge. He was both an officer and a researcher — a chemist in camouflage and boots — and one of his duties at the Biological Defense Research Directorate was to oversee incremental lab work, preparing the country for disasters to come. Now, on that day in March of 2016, he found himself confronting an emergency so immediate that even the briefest of delays could prove lethal.
What was being requested was a sample from the Navy’s collection of viruses. The word virus, to most of us, implies disease, but in this case the Navy wasn’t stockpiling pathogens. Instead, these viruses were potential cures. Called bacteriophages — literally, eaters of bacteria — they could inject themselves inside germs, reproduce like crazy, and cause the buggers to explode.
To the military, that image was alluring. Bacteriophage therapy had long been abandoned in the U.S., but as more and more antibiotics had stopped working, biodefense experts, Navy doctors — and just about anyone else with a stake in protecting human health — were wondering about other treatments. And these viruses, it seemed, could pop bacteria the way middle schoolers pop zits. So sailors began scooping them from seawater and sewage, sending their samples back to a lab freezer at Fort Detrick.
They’d been quietly amassing the viruses for years when word came that a doctor in California needed some of the Navy’s phages as a last, experimental shot at saving a man’s life. He was a civilian, a psychiatry professor named Tom Patterson. He’d fallen ill in Egypt, been flown to Germany, and now lay in La Jolla, his body kept alive — if just barely — by the gizmos of the ICU. The bacteria swarming inside him seemed invincible. Nothing in the antibiotic arsenal had worked. Machines inflated his lungs, pushing air through a hole in his neck. His belly was distended, pierced with tubes, so the brownish, bacterial-clouded liquid would have a place to go.
“He looked like a living skeleton,” said his wife, Steffanie Strathdee, associate dean of global health sciences at the University of California, San Diego. When a devout friend came to visit and saw Patterson’s face sunken, his jaw slack, she couldn’t help but think of Jesus, suffering on the cross.
Hamilton knew his lab had the right phages for the job. The question, batted back and forth between captains and commanders, was whether to send them. Their concerns were legitimate. They had tried phage therapy on mice, but they hadn’t even published the results yet. They knew nothing about giving them to humans. How much should they give? By what route of administration? Was it safe? You could just imagine the headlines: Navy Gives Untested Virus as Treatment, Kills Patient. “The logic there was that we are not in the health care business,” said Commander Michael Stockelman. “We cannot provide therapy.”
Then again, was it wrong to withhold it? Finally, the
