Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics
edge.org
edge.org
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.
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.)
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.
There's actually nothing statistically, logically or otherwise necessary about this.
Humanity could be wiped out in 10 years for all we know.
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."
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Having surgery at all meets any standard of "you did something wrong".
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.
This isn't new, though, that's just reality before this discovery—if we can't use our existing antibiotics we're screwed.
4th time posted to HN