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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

(http://v6.tinypic.com/player.swf?file=24goih4&s=6)

Here's a short snippet from a BBC Television programme (Horizon - 'defeating the superbugs').

It shows E.Coli developing anti-biotic resistance. There's a tray of nutrient jelly. The jelly is divided into sections. It starts with no antibiotic. Then there's a normal dose. Then there's a 10x dose, followed by 100x dose, followed by 1000x dose. They reach the limits of solubility. They cannot dissolve any more antibiotic into the jelly.

Then they drop E.Coli onto the normal jelly, and use a time lapse camera to show the growth.

After just two weeks the bacteria is able to live on the 1000x dosed jelly.

It's pretty impressive demonstration.

(Apologies for the suboptimal hosting site. YouTube's contentID blocks this video worldwide.)

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That's scarier than any horror movie that I've ever seen. It also makes perfect sense. You're providing nature with an evolutionary pressure and it adopts by breeding the most resistant strains until they are undefeatable.

Exactly why industrial scale monoculture is the single greatest threat to humanity. We rely almost entirely on a few dozen animals, vegetable plants, grasses and a handful of other organisms that have all have their comfort zones artificially inflated and their genetic variance severely compromised by human intervention.

We've essentially created vast plateaus within the evolutionary landscape and these are beginning to be occupied by pioneer species that will quickly take the advantage to adapt.

Scary stuff indeed.

It might help you feel better to know that E. coli is harmless, perhaps actually healthy, and competes in your intestines with other bacteria that might make you sick. (Except for some recent strains of E. coli that produce toxins.) The usual reason people get worried about E. coli contamination of food is not that the E. coli itself is dangerous, but rather that it's a reliable and easily-detectable indicator of fecal contamination.

Awesome. Thanks for that. Do you know if there are any examples showing the opposite approach? If they force the bacteria to go directly from no antibiotics to the maximum concentration, with no stepping stones, I wonder if that just slows down their mutation or if it actually makes it completely impossible.

The antibiotics will probably diffuse in the gel to a degree, so a step-function concentration might be difficult to establish.

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