Are you ready for a world without antibiotics?

guardian.co.uk

16 points·sankara··4 comments

I've heard this argument many times before and I'm well aware of the evolutionary mechanism behind strain resistance. However, I really have to wonder how much of this is just fear-mongering. Do we really believe that biotechnology will not keep ahead of this problem?

Unfortunately, outwitting evolution by natural selection over the long run isn't something I'd bet on.

What about genetic algorithms? We are starting to be able to co-evolve drugs and bacteria in computer simulations, allowing us to simulate future battles ahead of time.

Certainly the bacteria have an immense amount of computing power at their disposale... their evolution is being developed and tested in a massively parallel way. We will likely never have the computing resources they do...

But their search is quite random. We have the ability to target specifically promising scenarios and focus our limited computing resources on solving those.

And we also have the advantage of being able to analyze hypothetical scenarios. The bacteria can respond to what's happening now, but we can respond to what might happen in the future.

Not to mention the fact that we're just plain bigger, and have "cheat codes" like "use soap and water to wash the bacteria off your hands" that don't require antibiotics at all.

Not saying we're not in a precarious position, just that we have some advantages on our side of the fight.

I think that rather than focusing on coming up with new chemicals to kill bacteria, pharmaceutical companies should work on entirely new ways of fighting bacteria, like genetically modifying bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) to go after certain strains.

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