Pharmacies in the nation of Georgia have something ours don’t: vials of viruses in neat rows. People swallow or gargle the brews to combat routine bacterial infections. The viruses are bacteria-eaters that take on the human body’s enemies, sometimes with near-miraculous results. (Almost as amazing, kids even like the taste.)

These medicines, called bacteriophages, were developed over much of the 20th century, primarily in Georgia and other parts of Europe and the former Soviet Union, by dedicated scientists who battled not just microbes but also doubtful colleagues and corrupt politics. Meanwhile, much of Western medicine went all-in on antibiotics in the 1940s.

But microbes with resistance to those antibiotics emerged by the 1950s. Today, resistant microbes appear, on average, within two or three years of a new drug’s release. More than 1 million people succumb to drug-resistant infections every year, and the death toll could reach nearly 2 million per year by 2050.

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While new antibiotics continue to trickle out, medicine needs a radical solution, argues Lina Zeldovich in “The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost—and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail.” And that solution, she writes, has been sitting on the shelves of a bacteriophage institute in Tbilisi, Georgia, for decades. Unlike commercial antibiotics, phages evolve alongside their bacterial hosts, dodging and parrying the bacterial response so that for every pathogen, there’s likely a bacteriophage, somewhere, that eats it.

Zeldovich, a journalist who was born in the former Soviet Union, traces the history of phages from the early 20th-century recognition of their potential in Georgia and France to a nascent resurgence of interest in the U.S. today. Zeldovich details the personal stories of the men who first recognized phages’ potential before moving into their modern rediscovery and ongoing development in the U.S.

In places, the book is as much a history of 20th-century Soviet politics in Georgia as it is a science book. Much of the narrative stars the fathers of bacteriophage research, Georgian Giorgi Eliava and French Canadian Félix d’Hérelle.

Zeldovich describes d’Hérelle as self-taught and........

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