Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics
#2It'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.
Re: Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics
#3It'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.
Re: Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics
#4A 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."
Re: Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics
#5"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.
Re: Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics
#6What 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.
Re: Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics
#7What 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 ant…
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.
Re: Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics
#8What 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 ant…
[deleted]
Re: Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics
#9"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 a…
If things are speeding up (or eventually do), it would likely be thanks to all the "pessimism." With public outcry comes funding.
Re: Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics
#10"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 a…
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.