• Question: I was reading recently that due to increased prevalence of anti-biotic resistant bugs, a lot of modern advances in medicine will become useless. What are your thoughts? Will we live in fear of grazing our knees or will we find suitable alternatives?

    Asked by bolzanoweierstrass to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 19 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      We do need to find suitable alternatives. We also need to use less antibiotics, so the bugs have less of a change to evolve to resist them. I’m sure a lot of research is being put towards this problem though, because a world without anti bios would, indeed, be a scary place.

    • Photo: Marcus Gallagher-Jones

      Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 20 Mar 2012:

      Well the funny thing is that antibiotics have been around for millenia. This first antibiotics discovered were produced by fungi and other micro-organisms. There are plenty of new ones being used all the time as well. The big problem is that you will never kill off all the bugs in an infection. By using antibiotics we create a massive selective pressure for bacteria that are resistant. They are definitely being overused right now. On alternative being developed is using virus’s that infect bacteria selectively to pass on damaging genes to the infectious bacteria.

    • Photo: Martin Zaltz Austwick

      Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 23 Mar 2012:

      We don’t want to eradicate disease in any case. In H G Wells’ story, “The War of the Worlds”, (spoiler) aliens are defeated because their immune system can’t cope with the common cold. We don’t want to get to that state!

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