Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics
edge.org"But this pessimism rests entirely on one assumption: that we have no realistic prospect of developing new classes of antibiotics any time soon, antibiotics that our major threats have not yet seen and thus not acquired resistance to."
Uh, no. The "pessimism" (as it were) doesn't extend from that assumption. It extends from the fact that very few people are doing the basic research anymore, and even fewer companies are willing to invest the enormous amounts of money necessary to shuttle candidate drugs from promising lead to clinical approval. It's not as if this is the only story of a candidate antibiotic. Most don't become drugs.
And in any case, the "pessimism" isn't really pessimism, so much as a community of knowledgable people sounding the alarm about an impeding crisis. To the extent that it gets people doing innovative things to solve the problem, it's a good thing, not something to be criticized. I don't even know why you would write this kind of piece -- the caveats at the end notwithstanding, it makes it sound like we don't have to worry anymore, because things are "speeding up". But they aren't speeding up. This is a good discovery, but it's just a start.
When people will start dying en masse from this you'll see how suddenly the priorities will change. Sure, it's a tragedy right now that the incentives are not properly aligned, but I wouldn't worry about doomsday scenarios.
When people will start dying en masse from this you'll see how suddenly the priorities will change.
Someday, I hope to live in an educated, industrialized, humanist society that can change policy direction without large numbers of people dying. (Of course, I already do. The answer is lots of $$$, as usual.)
If things are speeding up (or eventually do), it would likely be thanks to all the "pessimism." With public outcry comes funding.
Yes, precisely. The first part of science is the identification of problems. It doesn't do much good to look at a serious problem through rose-colored glasses.
What I love about this article is that it demonstrates once again that some discoveries are actually pretty awesome. If I am not careful the unrelenting stories of future calamity can weigh me down, and yet I know intellectually that generally equal part bad and good things happen over time.
This is an excellent example of a "good" thing which wasn't even considered in papers and articles written about the coming antibiotic apocalypse. And it is critically important for engineers and scientists to not give into the "all is lost" mentality that the popular press uses to sell clicks and pageviews.
I would say the good things have gradually begun outweighing the bad in the last two centuries. The world has made obvious visible progress on every continent in countless metrics. Long way to go, but nonetheless.
To further illustrate this reality, I point thee to Hans Rosling.
>and yet I know intellectually that generally equal part bad and good things happen over time.
There's actually nothing statistically, logically or otherwise necessary about this.
Humanity could be wiped out in 10 years for all we know.
A popular science article on the researchers who discovered the way to culture the other 99% of soil bacteria:
http://www.popsci.com/ichip-new-way-find-antibiotics-and-oth...
"A team led by scientists from Northeastern University published a study describing a new class of antibiotics called teixobactin, which they found in the soil of a field in Maine. But what I found even more interesting than the teixobactin discovery—which other writers have also pointed out—was how the researchers were able to find it. They developed a device called an iChip, which allows scientists to explore the virtually untapped wilds of bacteria for potential antibiotics and other interesting unknown chemicals."
That's very nice and uplifting, but it would be great if some sources were provided. Like, who did the work? Where was it done? Where it was published? As it is, it is next to impossible to look into further.
I gave a popular science reference in another comment:
http://www.popsci.com/ichip-new-way-find-antibiotics-and-oth...
From that you should have enough keywords to chase up papers, labs, other discussion, etc.
Am I the only one who thought this part was weird?
"And as if that were not enough, here’s the kicker. This was not some kind of massive high-throughput screen of the kind we so often hear about in biomedical research these days. The researchers tried this approach just once, in essentially their back yard, on a very small scale, and it STILL worked the first time. What that tells us is that it can work again—and again, and again"
Why is the fact that it happened once, at a small scale, in a relatively uncontrolled situation, supposed to engender confidence? The point of science is doing it many times, at large scale, in a repeatable fashion. That's when we have confidence in the way things work.
Because they took it out for a short test drive and found a viable class of antibiotic compounds without really trying very hard. That is something that would have been expected to take years and a lot of money prior to their advance.
It isn't just antibiotics. There are groups using this and analogous methods based on the same conceptual breakthrough to mine the bacterial world for all sorts of stuff, and now their efforts are about a hundred times more effective and efficient.
Yes, exactly.
When you go fishing and the very moment your hook touches the water you catch a big fat fish, well, that's probably one hell of a water hole.
And in this case they caught one hell of a fish.
> The point of science is doing it many times, at large scale, in a repeatable fashion. That's when we have confidence in the way things work.
Science says nothing about scale, only repeatability.
Unless if you're going to consider cosmology and the study of subatomic particles (e.g. particle colliders), among many other fields, entirely bunk.
Sometimes you can't test things at the scale of nature, and that's ok. We made it this far without doing so.
One thing to consider is Antibiotics are not actually need very often. I had intestional surgery a while back and they never put me on a course of antibiotics. Now they probably gave me a shot of something in surgery, but we can do a lot to minimize the risks without them.
They are often used as a crutch and end up promoting sloppy technique. Basically infections are a sign you did something wrong, removing that feedback promotes problems.
> Basically infections are a sign you did something wrong, removing that feedback promotes problems.
Having surgery at all meets any standard of "you did something wrong".
Less so than you might think. Unless you want to suggest bad DNA is some how your fault. However, I am speaking from the surgeons perspective.
In the sense of your comment, that "infections are a sign you did something wrong", having surgery is "doing something wrong". Your body has no plan for you to undergo surgery; it relies on the assumption that your skin separates your inside from your outside and any contact between inside and outside not mediated by your skin or your stomach is a catastrophic failure.
Anyone can find a drug which works in a petri dish. The real valley of death for drugs is everything after that. If ever a swallow did not make a spring...
It's a good news/bad news scenario. Good news is that we've potentially found a new way to create antibiotics. The bad news is that it took us so long to think of it and millions more might die of new diseases before we can finally get efficacy at scale out of these techniques.
What new diseases? Antibiotic resistance is most problematic in old friends.
The good news is that we are still equipped with hygiene and an understanding of what causes infection, which goes an awful long way towards limiting the spread of it. In a historical context, both of those things are almost as new as antibiotics themselves.
> The bad news is that it took us so long to think of it and millions more might die of new diseases before we can finally get efficacy at scale out of these techniques.
This isn't new, though, that's just reality before this discovery—if we can't use our existing antibiotics we're screwed.
Obligatory George Carlin "fear of germs" link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnmMNdiCz_s
4th time posted to HN
There are plenty of docters who treat a C diff infection with PRObiotics, i.e. let good bacteries kill the bad bacteries. So do not worry and go to a doctor that practises functional medicine.