In the late 1990s, Graham Hatfull and colleagues reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) their findings about genetic connections between distantly related bacteriophages, viruses that kill bacteria, in a paper titled “Evolutionary relationships among diverse bacteriophages and prophages: All the world’s a phage.”
More than 25 years later in 2024, Hatfull was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences and invited to publish a special inaugural paper in PNAS, its peer-reviewed journal. He chose to reflect on the past quarter century of phage research — discoveries, new tools, and breakthrough treatments — but also on the model under which he’s been working.
In his work, Hatfull, who is the Eberly Family Professor of Biotechnology in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, has not confined himself to a lab surrounded by thousands of frozen phage samples — although he has the phages and the freezers to do so.
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