> Like many of his predecessors, Reverend Stone believed that the remedy to a malady could be found close to the cause. That is, if people were becoming sick in a certain place, there should be a plant or other remedy nearby. Huh, this paragraph caught me - I was recently involved with a group using large-scale environmental metagenomic sampling to try to find good candidates for a drug discovery pipeline. The workin…
tldr --
there is a theory that because bacteria must protect themselves from their own lethal chemicals, genes for toxins are likely co-located with their corresponding antidotes, allowing researchers to find cures alongside poisons