Inside STAT: How the Navy hopes to revive a long-derided therapy

Dr. Carl Merril in the garden of his Bethesda, Md., home.ERIC KRUSZEWSKI FOR STAT

For years, the U.S. Navy quietly amassed bacteriophages — viruses that blow up bacteria — with the hope that they might one day be used as cures for dangerous infections, though they'd never tested them in humans. But in 2016, 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 — which they did. The military microbiologists started to think about how to turn its cache of vials into drugs. They turned to Dr. Carl Merril, a race car enthusiast and retired NIH scientist whose decades of phage research had earned him both celebration and criticism. STAT's Eric Boodman has a fascinating new story about Merril, the military, and the mission to revive phage therapy — read here.