Antibiotics that Don’t Kill Bacteria.
02.13.09 by David Vitrant
Antibiotics and drug resistant bacteria are a little talked about yet growing problem. I recently saw a well written and lay person oriented article about creating antibiotics that don’t kill bacteria. The article is here.
Ok. Now to the question everyone is probably asking by now: Why is that a good thing? Isn’t more bacteria around a bad thing ?
In order to answer that question I have to say a few general things about bacteria in general:
- Bacteria grow and reproduce very very quickly.
- It usually only takes one or a few bacteria to re-grow a complete colony.
- Most if not all therapies deal with inhibiting the bacteria and killing it off (usually while killing other types of bacteria as well)…
Ok so what does this mean in the context of evolution and natural selection.. Imagine you have a pool of 100 “bad/good” bacteria.. you wash your hands with soap or take an antibiotic and 99 of them die. Well those 99 where “selected” against by the antibiotic. The antibiotic killed those 99 bacteria but 1 survived. That 1 somehow wasn’t affected by the antibiotic or the antibiotic didn’t kill it but slowed it down. Well that one will grow and grow, and eventually become 100 newly “selected” bacteria that no longer are affected by the antibiotic and we have to make new and more powerful antibiotics to start the cycle over.
This is the current problem in hospitals with drug resistant Staph and C-diff infections (I fear all the precautions listed at the end of this last link) which are on the rise. The fact that we put antibacterial soap everywhere, and everything has antibacterial properties added to it is a very dangerous road to travel down. I myself hope these new antibiotics arrive because instead of killing 99 bacteria and leaving one to survive, you leave the 100 bacteria population intact, but either unable to communicate with each other or at diminished capacity. Thus you are not “forcing” constant selection on a very fast growing population of bacteria. In addition these antibiotics might be less toxic to our natural bacterial flora’s and also our system. This is not to say that these new drugs won’t force selection in another unforeseen fashion but hopefully this will occur at a slower rate. All living beings have to evolve and adapt to the ever changing environment in order to survive so some type of selection will always persist the question is how fast.
These types of ideas are ones that I would love to see go through our FundScience grant application process and presented to the public. We would like to fund scientific ideas that are “outside the box” but have a large potential public impact both in the education of Scientific topics but also in the possible therapeutic or scientific outcomes of the research.
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