Here’s the context: “Eighty years after Alexander Fleming
discovered penicillin on a moldy culture dish, the battle
against killer bugs is faltering. More and more bacteria –
including insidious tuberculosis strains that have cropped up2 –
now shrug off almost all antibiotics. Meanwhile, few new
antibiotics are reaching the clinic. Medicine is on the
defensive, says microbiologist and physician Stuart Levy of
Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. ‘We are not
keeping up with the bacteria.’” Antibiotic resistance has been a
remarkable instance of natural selection in progress. Now there
is something even more remarkable concerning the seemingly
endless capacity for microbes to do just about anything
biochemically. They can even bacteria that can survive with
nothing to eat but antibiotics. It’s not clear why the soil
bacteria examined by Geneticist George Church and team appear
particularly skilled at converting cytotoxic antibiotics into a
carbon source, nor whether this is connected to the developmen