Lina Zeldovich
AUTHOR / JOURNALIST
About Me
Lina Zeldovich grew up in a dissident family of Soviet scientists, listening to bedtime stories about volcanoes and black holes, and learned English as a second language in her twenties as an immigrant New Yorker. Now an award-winning author, speaker, and Columbia Journalism School alumna, she has published stories in Popular Science, The York Times, Smithsonian, National Geographic, Scientific American and more. Her previous book, “The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health,” has been optioned for a TV series. Her new book, “The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost—and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail” will be released from St. Martin’s Press in October 2024. The book unveils the story of the century-old, nearly forgotten antibiotic-free cure for drug-resistant infections that’s finally getting to the American clinic—and people who made it possible against all odds.
Preorder THE LIVING MEDICINE.
Bacteriophages—or “phages”—are living medicines: viruses that devour bacteria. Ubiquitous in the environment, they are found in water, soil, inside plants and animals, and in the human body. When phages were first recognized as medicines in 1917, their promise seemed limitless. Grown by scientists and physicians in France, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere, they cured cholera, dysentery, and even bubonic plague.
But after Stalin’s brutal purges and the rise of antibiotics, phage therapy was nearly lost to history—until today. THE LIVING MEDICINE reveals the remarkable history of phages, told through the lives of the French, Soviet, and American scientists who discovered, developed, and are reviving this unique cure for seemingly intractable diseases. Ranging from Paris to Soviet Georgia to Egypt, India, Kenya, and America, the Living Medicine shows how phages can save tens of thousands of lives today, when our antibiotic shield collapses.
To write this book, I travelled to Tbilisi, where I read family diaries, listened to stories at dinner tables, and combed through KGB records. As I was writing, I felt as if I knew the people whose story I was telling. I could see them, I could hear them talk, laugh and argue, I pained for them when they were arrested and tortured, and I cried as I wrote about their last moments. It’s been a privilege to write their story, and to show how science succeeds against all odds—because this method is finally in clinical trials.
The Living Medicine is a thriller-like narrative about people who discovered phage therapy and people who revived it a century later. It tells the story of how it happened and why we should know about it—for our own health choices.
THE OTHER DARK MATTER has been optioned for a TV series!
The average person produces about four hundred pounds of excrement a year. More than seven billion people live on this planet. Holy crap!
Because of the diseases it spreads, we have learned to distance ourselves from our dark matter, but the long line of engineering marvels we’ve created to do so—from Roman sewage systems and medieval latrines to the immense, computerized treatment plants we use today—have also done considerable damage to the earth’s ecology. Now scientists tell us: we’ve been wasting our waste. When recycled correctly, this resource, cheap and widely available, can be converted into a sustainable energy source, act as an organic fertilizer, provide effective medicinal therapy for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, and much more. Hygienic waste repurposing can help battle climate change, reduce acid rain, and eliminate toxic algal blooms. Grossly ambitious, fully scientific and recently optioned to be a TV series, THE OTHER DARK MATTER shows how human excrement can be a life-saving, money-making resource—if we make better use of it!