"Phage therapy uses properties of bacteriophage viruses to treat disease. It involves deploying viruses into the human body to consume bacteria in order to treat infection. This may seem counter-intuitive after years of an ongoing global pandemic, but one that needs to be taken seriously in light of increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics, which The World Health Organization believes to be one of the major public health challenges of the 21st century. How do phages work? What concerns - both biological and social - exist in deploying viruses in this way? In Our Viral Futures Charlotte Brives explores the complex and varied relationships between humans, phages, and bacteria in order to understand how and in what contexts these viruses can provide a relevant response to the problem of antibiotic resistance. This includes patients seeking treatment for painful and debilitating chronic infections, collective attempts to establish new regulatory frameworks to research into the interactions between phages and bacteria in the laboratory, setting up of clinical trials, researching microbial ecology to understand the seeming limitless relationships between humans and microbes that inextricably link human societies and microbial communities, and the dangers of economic capture. As these relationships are described, the evolutionary potential of microbes blurs the dividing lines and the usual categories with which scientists think about the world, giving rise to new moral and political questions. Brives argues that microbes have their own agency and as a result, humans need to deal with them. Phage therapy may be a first step in this new kind of relationship"-- Provided by publisher.